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“... takes place that will not finally be redeemed and retrieved. As the self-educated inventor Fred T. Barry assures our eponymous hero: ‘Human being [sic] always treat blizzards as though they were the end of the world.’ But the raging storms that have swept over the plains of the Middle West are due to vanish without trace, or without significant ...”

“... them at each other’s throats: convicts die violently, he claims, at the rate of more than four a day. He explains that there are not that many ‘homosexuals’ behind bars, but that homosexual friendships, based on intimidation, domination, protection, and a need for comfort and affection, are a large feature of the system. Half-Irish and half-Chinese, Jack ...”

“... and can only have compounded the grief of the families when they were told the truth the next day. Johnson has little difficulty in proving that the source of this false story was the CIA: the Korean Government admitted it. He has even less difficulty in showing that the shooting down of the airliner must have been recorded in the closest possible detail ...”

“... In France, Louis Althusser and his disciples, and in England followers such as Paul Q. Hirst and Barry Hindess, have argued that the business of Marxist intellectuals is to construct not history but theory (e.g. a rationally water tight account of the transition from feudalism to capitalism, not one purportedly told from the ‘facts’ and ...”

“... that could be repackaged as a stand-alone gift book. You don’t want to be told on graduation day that life is fucked up and baffling and the rest of it will be a long, largely unpleasant march towards death. That’s the sort of thing Antrim’s characters say, at least when they’re not delusional. His novels are narrated by middle-aged intellectuals ...”

“... like houses perched on cliffs, then the blinding absence of a horizon at noon on a summer’s day and the steep plunge to the road below are unnerving. Before lunch there was swimming, and the vague sense of being sized up. The host reclined on a beach chair under an umbrella dressed in a faded denim shirt and a pair of ancient, stained trousers, his ...”

“... of identity, and, unbelievably, they became fashionable. Ethnic commodities like St Patrick’s Day and the Irish pub are now being exported back to Ireland. As the Irish have become more cosmopolitan, Irish identity has been packaged for the market. The danger may be that in the process more open definitions of Irishness will be closed down. Irish ethnic ...”

“... The United States, even the world, desperately needs more Ellsbergs. Sunday, 13 June 1971 is a day I remember very clearly: the day when excerpts from the History of US Decision-Making in Vietnam, 1945-68 (the actual title of the ‘Pentagon Papers’) began to appear in the press. I was serving as a consultant to the ...”

“... architects and (rarely) statesmen. Some sections have something of the quality of a diary or a day-book: he takes note of public events (Jeremy Corbyn’s election as Labour leader, the Brexit vote), responds to the books he’s reading and to what’s in the papers, as well as occasionally registering very beautifully the changing seasons in his garden ...”

“... that she took 40 mg doses and was addicted ‘overnight’. She went from taking three pills a day to as many as 18 of them. Not everyone is partial to the feeling produced by morphine derivatives, but for the people who like it, OxyContin seems to represent an apex. ‘Oxycodone provides the most glowing and rapturous high I have experienced in my very ...”

“... physical contact with women. The new Malcolm X learned to pray, slept little and ate one meal a day. He grew close to the Messenger, who named him a minister of Detroit’s Temple No. 1 of the Lost-Found Nation of Islam. And he began to preach. Within a few years Malcolm went from Detroit to Boston and from Boston to Harlem’s Temple No. 7, soon the ...”

“... close-framed, in Perspex, so that one saw only the actual image.’ After working together all day on trying to hang them, they were in despair. Returning in the morning she found that Fraser ‘had painted the entire place black – walls, ceiling, all the woodwork, everything was completely black. And so these little light, pale studies, very fragile ...”

“... Smirke, with what Pevsner called ‘high Victorian cruelty’, to house the Royal Academy. Charles Barry Jr and Robert Banks added the ranges that enclose the courtyard and house the Linnean, Geological and Astronomical Societies and the Society of Antiquaries. Solid Victorian temples to art and the life of the mind, they preserve something of the dignity, not ...”

“... for many years, his creed. Interestingly, this poem for Russell Davies, written while filming with Barry Humphries in Cardiff, is couched in rhyme royal, a stanza which is a Manx-cat version of ottava rima, though it may well predate it, having been used by Chaucer. Auden also decided on rhyme royal for ‘Letter to Lord Byron’, probably to avoid too direct ...”

“... in which technical expertise bears on it. Eating is something that everybody does, several times a day if they’re lucky. For those fortunate enough to decide what they want to eat, expertise can insinuate itself into the exercise of dietary choice. In the tradition of Galenic medicine that reigned from antiquity through much of the 19th century, food and ...”