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“... doubtless think time well spent? W.J. West believes his book gives a clear answer. On its first page he asserts: ‘The accepted verdict that these years were largely wasted is decisively overturned.’ And on the final page of his introductory essay he makes a powerful point about the literary bias of our culture that ...”

“... to reflect Hinton’s theories without staking the success of the book on them. The contents page offers mild reassurance, in the shape of a timeline and a family tree, but also mild intimidation, since the chapters are named after geometrical objects or concepts, adding a dimension each time, from ‘Point’ to ‘Line’ to ‘Square’ to ...”

“... been had he not come to England as a boy but grown up in Communist Czechoslovakia.On nearly every page of Hermione Lee’s biography – the life as it has been, not as re-imagined – there is something arresting. In one instance it is a teasing secret: we are told that while he was writing The Real Thing, and married to his second wife, there was something ...”

“... Kabul I met people who spoke of the world in specifically anti-rationalist terms. The talk was of Alan Watts, Timothy Leary, Ken Kesey, Ouspensky, of bits and pieces of Jung, of the I Ching and the Tarot cards and of how psychotropic drugs, which we consumed in large quantities, might transform the mechanistic, aggressive world we had left behind into the ...”

“... aesthetic mode is the shadowy one of parody, as the current tone is the impassively ironic. Thus, Alan Brownjohn’s A Night in the Gazebo ends with a parody, an affectionate rewrite of Sir Gawain called ‘The Seventh Knight and the Green Cat’, which closes with a volte-face. Whatever Mr Brownjohn has to say he says ‘truthfully’: it is hard to think of ...”

“... text of the play, through its history on the stage and through its critical fortunes. The title page of the first edition mentions ‘the extreme cruelty of Shylock the Jew towards the said Merchant [Antonio]’. Jews had been legally excluded from England since 1290, and the few to be met in London were likely to be exceptional in some way, like the ...”

“... cramped conditions. Her characters seem not described but embodied. Acting came in handy off the page too. She knew how to cut a dash, draw the gaze, and deflect it. An air of vagueness – and a celebrated stuffed buffalo in the hall of her house – fed into constricted ideas about women who write books. Big brain or scatterbrain? Bainbridge had a fringe ...”

“... was in fact one of the King’s favourites and still in his service ten years later. The other page, Fortnum, left to found the grocer’s, and in the Seventies, I remember, one used to be accosted in the store in far-from-18th-century language by two bewigged figures, Mr Fortnum and Mr Mason – actually two unemployed actors. I found the Opposition (an ...”

“... But some of the papers, which print these corrections pretty obscurely, feature on the front page photographs of nail bombs supposedly found in the bombers’ car. So what one finds oneself thinking is that if the death on Stockwell Station can be deliberately misrepresented why should not also the existence of the nail bombs? It’s the Blair lies ...”

“... to this notion. He is familiar with ‘a related theory from editing – often, the problem on page 172 is not a problem on page 172 but something that needs fixing on page 46 and the issue on the later page is no longer a problem.’ This tends to ...”

“... at more intensity in his own best novels; Gavin Ewart’s affectionate ode is almost ideally deft; Alan Bennett’s implacably wary set – piece (‘Why not something more along the lines of a biscuit barrel?’) makes one laugh a good deal more, or more festively, than most festschrift items do. In short, Larkin at Sixty gets a lot of different kinds of ...”

“... thing new in this world is the history you don’t know,’ Peace quotes Harry Truman on the title page of Nineteen Seventy Four. And there is the idea that Yorkshire is an English Sicily or Deep South: the most primal, brutal, prejudiced and, in a sense, politically honest place in the country, the place where the battles that matter are played out. Peace ...”

“... of the Versailles Treaty. Wittgenstein had seen the silence of what cannot be expressed, Alan Turing the soul of a machine. Apparently there was now some crippled young man at King’s who was working on a unified field theory that would explain absolutely everything. Surrounded by these exemplars of mental effort, I couldn’t even be sure that I ...”

“... the music inside will come from Creation Records, the label which launched Oasis, whose founder, Alan McGee, gave Blair a cool £10,000 to nurture Young Labour and pay for the Youth Rally in Blackpool; it was the same McGee who presented Blair with the band’s platinum disk, and gave the now legendary riposte to Virginia Bottomley when invited to a bash for ...”

“... continued dominance of British education by a narrowly literary concern. That provoked him to a page of indignant rhetoric. My position, he writes, grows out of a ‘Rousseauite reluctance to make children work’, and defends the disappearance of languages from the American school curriculum – two charges I reject completely. Besides, my position ...”