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“... off with two of them. Keeping it, I reckoned, would be like having an object from a concentration camp in your backyard. Anyway it’s better if people can see it. So I gave the little museum in Glenties the pot, not wanting to be thought of as another rapacious Northerner – or ‘Northern fucker’, as the Northern Irish can be referred to here. I go on to ...”

“... southern Iraq, just south of Amara, the main city of Maysan province, the British military base at Camp Abu Naji was preparing for the night. Set at the northern end of the marshlands between the Tigris and the Euphrates, the camp is now abandoned and looted, but in May 2005 it was a busy centre of military operations. Amara ...”

“... doors have an air of apple-pie folksiness: come on in, kids, the gang’s all here. ‘Camp’ was once the highbrow’s word for it: but lowbrows too have long relished the mock-terrors of the old dark house. Movies in that genre rarely scared anyone past adolescence. The same applied to the films noirs of the 1940s. Bogart was never really a ...”

“... they are beautiful, says Lucienne. The most important one in Paris at present is Joseph Mallord William Turner, who has bowled the town over. Is it worth fighting to see the Turners at the Grand Palais through a six-deep screen of visitors saying ‘Tiens, que c’est beau,’ when we shall soon see them in one great permanent collection here? Yes. But the ...”

“... According to this model, the Iraqi people are a blank sheet on which to inscribe the ideas of William Kristol, Robert Kagan and other deep thinkers of the Far Right. As I said in an earlier article for the LRB (17 October 2002), such ideas were first tried out by Ariel Sharon in Lebanon during the 1982 invasion, and then more recently in ...”

“... Barlow, Spinks and Charlie), but the horror turns out to be historically real: the concentration camp at Belsen, which Spinks claims to have visited as an American soldier, before improbably marrying a survivor. As Mar goes further down the rabbit hole of Spinks’s life, we begin to feel his story is just a bit too composed, the density of incident a little ...”

“... a degree of consciousness and concentration which the very best stories don’t seem to have. William Gass rationally observed that the story ‘is a poem grafted onto a sturdier stock’ but Borges decreed that ‘unlike the novel, it may be essential.’ That has an ominous sound. None of these suggestions seems to fit the way in which V.S. Pritchett ...”

“... Yes, he’s madly upper crust. In the minority were those impressed, such as Stephen Spender and William Plomer. Betjeman wrote to the latter thanking him. ‘Fuck Wain and the prig in the Times who was probably Griggers’ – Geoffrey Grigson, another in his rogues’ gallery. ‘I’ve gone away to escape further blows.’ His publisher hoped to steer ...”

“... expect from the author of Plateforme (2001), and a less expected enthusiasm for the writings of William Morris – becomes the victim of an extravagantly gruesome murder. The Map and the Territory therefore carries out a kind of double self-annihilation: the imagined slaying of the writer called ‘Houellebecq’, and the aesthetic triumph of an artist ...”

“... officials, but the US consistently supported the Israeli position. One American participant at Camp David in 2000 later said: ‘Far too often, we functioned … as Israel’s lawyer.’ Finally, the Bush administration’s ambition to transform the Middle East is at least partly aimed at improving Israel’s strategic situation. This extraordinary ...”

“... bitch!’ in her honour. They’ve learned, Carol Burke writes in her study of military folklore, Camp All-American, Hanoi Jane and the High-and-Tight, what you learn at all the service academies: ‘that being a real warrior and hating Jane Fonda are synonymous.’* When Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial was built on the Washington Mall, well-organised ...”

“... The Life and Letters volume reprints the first biography, by his masterly literary executor William Frederic Badé. The narrative is laced with Muir’s letters, which rival Lawrence’s in the wholeheartedness of their responses to life around him and to his correspondents. In them we see a man at one with himself and with the granite, the fast ...”

“... He had inherited a family tradition of populist politics suffused with unabashed religiosity. William Wedgwood Benn had started as a Congregationalist and a Liberal: at 28 the youngest MP in the 1906 Parliament (whereas his own father had had to wait for a seat until he was 42). ‘Now Anthony has been chosen at the age of 25, so the family seems to be ...”

“... into 89, then, it carried its point. But no date will ever mark history’s high tide.In a work-camp of enthusiasts which I attended in Cuba that summer, where the ideological level was not as low as some of you may think, there was a sort of dress-rehearsal when the Warsaw Pact went grinding into Czechoslovakia. All the conventional arguments, about ...”

“... specific to the latecomer. And it’s not clear that the implacable deafness is pathological. William Gibson said the future is already with us, it’s just not very evenly distributed: someone who indefatigably comes to your house when you have crawled away in exhaustion is a social monstrosity but also, quite possibly, simply caught in a wrinkle in ...”