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“... end of a telescope: so many scuttling figures, comically diminished in scale, like poor, tiny Douglas Hogg, with his flat cap and backpack, breathlessly hurrying down the street pursued by a giant fuzzy insect in the form of a microphone. ‘That is not correct. That is not correct,’ he told the insect, like a pedantic character in Alice in ...”

“... to have, and then strands us in complicated doubt. Dark clouds ran across the face of the moon; day broke; his teeth chattered; Frédéric bent forward; the parapet was a trifle wide. Straightforward enough. But no, the fifth phrase is surely different, because of the ‘trifle’ (‘un peu’), which suggests a mind making judgments rather than a voice ...”

“... anniversary of US-Soviet relations, complete with a speech by Olivia de Havilland … The next day, John Wayne learns that the Selective Service board has extended his 3-A deferment. Hot dog! The star celebrates Thanksgiving Day by carving turkeys at the canteen, even as Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin meet in Tehran to ...”

“... hands. Betjeman, looking amusingly miserable, is on his knees. Among the bull’s-eyes are Robin Day, Ian Paisley, David Owen, Douglas Hurd, Kenneth Baker, David Mellor, Alan Bennett. There are a few outers: Jonathan Miller, Stephen Spender, Alfred Brendel, Melvyn Bragg – but even in these he is good on the ...”

“... in Beat literature, experimental poetry, pulp writing and ‘modern firsts’, to this very day. So the Compendium audience, roughly, might be said to represent Sinclair’s most immediate constituency, his groupies, his home supporters, the sort of folk most likely to get a fair percentage of his innumerable sideswiping references and bitter, impacted ...”

“... readers that there are no imaginative exits from history. Rereading these lines on a damp day in May, I reflect that Keith Joseph is poised to close down a dozen tutorials on Matthew Arnold and that Holub speaks also to this society. He is a magnificent, astringent genius and this volume sings with an oblique and cutting candour, a tubular coolness we ...”

“... secures its place in his title because the 1943 evacuation of this village in advance of D-Day – at first promised by Churchill to be temporary but after the war becoming permanent – was the most notorious recent case of military intervention in Purbeck. For Wright the anti-triumphalist, the fate of Tyneham, of Tyneham Great House and of their ...”

“... seventh continent where past and present are discontinuous’. Continent reads to me like a latter-day Erewhon, but less pointed – and I don’t much enjoy Erewhon either, once the author has crossed the Southern Alps into his invented world. Invention is not the same as imagination; and probably neither is as useful to the novelist as a simple talent for ...”

“... you could put together a second and third collection of nature notes, of just as high a quality.) Douglas Parmée nicely continues this tradition of intra-larceny, adding, for example, ‘Le Lever du soleil’ from the collection L’Oeil clair. His elegant and humorous translation is accompanied by Bonnard’s sunny black and white sketchings. A year before ...”

“... not on some fairy-tale version of what we would like them to be.’ That, at any rate, is what Douglas Kenrick has to tell us. Sam Harris begins The Moral Landscape in much the same way: ‘The more we understand ourselves at the level of the brain, the more we will see that there are right and wrong answers to questions of human values.’ Kenrick and ...”

“... Forty-Five. Manuscripts, sheets and books went to and fro either on horseback (like John Home’s Douglas in the snowy February of 1755), on the Leith packet or by stagecoach, which, according to the Edinburgh bookseller William Creech, increased from one service a month in 1763 to 15 a week 20 years later. In addition to linking talent where it was to ...”

“... things were elsewhere by timing how long it took for our messages to be ‘Acknowledged’. That day, Tuesday 22 April, the first of my ten days on duty with Fred, the battle-lines were still being drawn. By the 29th our messages weren’t being acknowledged at all, and I was reduced to merely telephoning Head Office to dictate ‘situation reports’, the ...”

“... and civil servants with, say, the absolute confidence of the generation of Hugh Gaitskell and Douglas Jay that ministers would feel no temptation to cheat and that if they had done so their civil servants would have stopped them. Behind the old confidence lay a peculiar history. The idea of a civil service is an English idea, but its origins do not lie in ...”

“... in war and peace around Crimea, Byelorussia, Kiev and Odessa (I use the spellings chosen by Douglas Smith in the book), all places of which we have a more recent and incompatible sense; a prose writer from a time when prose writers were eclipsed by poets (Blok, Bely, Akhmatova, Mandelstam, Tsvetayeva, Pasternak, Yesenin, Mayakovsky); who was himself, in ...”

“... question of why Lowland Scots, as different in pedigree as David Daiches, the film-maker Bill Douglas, Jimmy Boyle and Anne Smith, should be so determined to rake over and publicly display their childhoods (all more or less deprived childhoods, though in Daiches’ case less so from poverty than from an austerely Judaist upbringing). To take a topical ...”