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“... see the Royal Family, from the formal studies to the candid shot. I was surprised to discover in Anthony Holden’s book how recent a development this is.* He quotes the Duke of Windsor: ‘I grew up before the age of the flash camera, when newspapers still employed large staffs of artists to depict the daily events with pen sketches ... Because our ...”

“... it. Synge, for example, found a lot to revere in the riproaring primitivism he attributed to the West of Ireland. Another Irish writer, Peader O’Donnell, held that socialism had much to offer the inhabitants of certain unworldly townlands in Donegal, along with the rest of the country. In his view, the self-contained community might grow stagnant and ...”

“... They ran that woman out of County Clare,’ said one of the plain people of the West of Ireland, following the notoriety caused by Edna O’Brien’s fine first novel, The Country Girls, published in 1960. The notoriety was echoed in England: the last of England’s eminent Edwardian novelists, L.P. Hartley, described the novel, she has recalled, as ‘the skittish story of two Irish nymphomaniacs ...”

“... in 1981. James Merrill, John Hollander and John Ashbery spoke in similarly emphatic terms, while Anthony Hecht saluted an ‘extraordinarily fine’ debut and Harold Bloom hailed the arrival of a great original. ‘I think I speak for many,’ David Kalstone wrote, ‘in saying it appeared with that sense of completeness of utterance and identity that must ...”

“... In Salgotarjan I run into a journalist who expresses anxieties about the future: ‘Bankers in the West used to believe that the Soviet Union would bail out other Socialist countries if they ran into trouble. Poland and Rumania have run into trouble and the Soviet Union hasn’t lifted a finger to help. Hungary is suffering now: it is being put into the same ...”

“... it should come out only after the death in 1983 of his father’s most celebrated lover, Rebecca West.) Wells insisted that his tribute to Jane be prefixed to this memoir of his vie amoureuse to provide the full picture, or, at least, the full picture as he liked to see it. His account is inevitably selective but also surprisingly frank, especially about ...”

“... foul for sailing. However, Medina Sidonia did not sweep past, spreading all possible sail with the west-north-west breeze on his larboard quarter, making the best of his way up the Channel; nor did he attack Plymouth; he shortened sail, waited for some stragglers, and called a council of war. In the meantime, by dint of very ...”

“... of everyday customs in today’s ‘risk society’. According to the risk society theory of Anthony Giddens, Ulrich Beck and others, we no longer live our lives in compliance with Nature or Tradition; there is no symbolic order or code of accepted fictions (what Lacan calls the ‘Big Other’) to guide us in our social behaviour. All our impulses, from ...”

“... Adam Tooze points out in his brilliant book Shutdown, 91 per cent of deaths in the contemporary West are from noncommunicable diseases like cancers and strokes and heart attacks, many of them illnesses associated with modern lifestyles. The equivalent figure in sub-Saharan Africa is 34 per cent. We have a generation of leaders in the ...”

“... of our knowledge of the chronology of the ancient world. Born and brought up at Agen in the west of France, he was the son of Julius Caesar Scaliger, a Latin scholar of distinction, who claimed to be descended from those Della Scalas who were lords of Verona during the Middle Ages. So far as he was able, the elder Scaliger gave his son a thorough ...”

“... to the understanding of an alien or half-alien culture – contemporary Japan, or the Medieval West – but one path which appears to lead into the interior is the study of that culture’s heroes. If we can only discover why, say, kamikaze pilots or Medieval saints have been singled out for honour, so the argument goes, the basic values of the culture ...”

“... thing, with a ghastly woodcut on it. Nobody knew how this woodcut got on it. There was a piece by Anthony Powell called ‘A Reference for Mellors’, which was about somebody coming to Lady Chatterley for a reference for a gamekeeper. The magazine sort of launched me on a career, because Alan Pryce-Jones, who was then the editor of the TLS, gave me a lot of ...”

“... joy of reading the letter’ containing what Julian called ‘great news’: he was sleeping with Anthony Blunt – his ‘first love affair’. She realised then that he ‘meant to tell me things. I had never expected it.’ After Blunt Julian’s affairs were heterosexual, but there were quite a few of them, they often ran concurrently and he provided a ...”

“... Second World War. This occurred at Saint-Valéry-en-Caux, a small port some hundred miles south-west of Dunkirk. It is often said that the French, acting unilaterally, gave up fighting, and, carrying white flags, marched in front of the 51st Highland Division, thereby preventing them from firing at the Germans. Warner explains the extraordinary confusion of ...”

“... of himself sits oddly with a rather stiffly elevated prose style – a strange combination of Anthony Powell and the ‘aforesaid’ and ‘as has been noted’ of the legal brief – and if one were to be searching for a clue to the author’s true self-valuation, one might start by looking at his syntax rather than at any of his stated sins. A further ...”