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“... one of the world’s grand promises. ‘They can’t forget me,’ one of them said, the red-ash pitch blazing under our sandshoes.‘They won’t,’ I said. I wasn’t sure who he meant.‘They will,’ he said. ‘And that makes me want to kill somebody.’The boys were locked in at night, and after dark, over the barking of dogs, they would stand at ...”

“... Andrewes, for example, he can break in on his own prose and say, ‘I was writing last week on John Dos Passos,’ and then go on to make a comparison between the two authors’ respective forms of revulsion from industrial society. Describing himself as ‘a concision fetishist’, Wilson recommended that the literary journalist should steer a path ...”

“... though his analogy was the bell jar rather than the greenhouse – and proved experimentally by John Tyndall in 1859. In the 19th century it could be seen as unambiguously a good thing: if carbon dioxide and other trace gases didn’t trap heat in the atmosphere, the earth wouldn’t be warm enough to support life as we know it. But there is now far more ...”

“... but was a blockbuster bestseller, popping to number one on the fiction list just ahead of John le Carré’s The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. We shall never see the noble likes of such bestseller lists again. Twenty years after his debut with Dangling Man (1944), after an already notable run that included The Adventures of Augie March (his ...”

“... At one dinner party of New Age contributors, Mansfield – who was going by Yékaterina – met John Middleton Murry, an Oxford student who was starting up an art and literary magazine of his own, Rhythm. He was already her fan: ‘In a German Pension seemed to express, with a power I envied, my own revulsion from life,’ he would write in his ...”

“... who criticised all the beliefs of his time?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘What about Satoshi?’ ‘It means “ash”,’ he said. ‘The philosophy of Nakamoto is the neutral central path in trade. Our current system needs to be burned down and remade. That is what cryptocurrency does – it is the phoenix …’ ‘So satoshi is the ...”

“... building, a 16th-century revision of the 13th-century church founded by the Knights of St John. The Hole is a statement and it is properly capitalised. The labourers, a self-confessed art collective, work the Hole by hand, with pick and shovel, turn and turn about: four days to complete a grave shaft, without any of the tortured grinding and ...”

“... hold of the vase with the cremains in it. ‘The astrologer ran toward the sea tossing handfuls of ash and bone while he proclaimed – “You’re free, Kathy! You’re finally free!”’ ‘Where to inter the remains of those who live in a state of perpetual transience?’ Kraus asks. ‘To remain in one place is either privation or luxury. No one I know ...”

“... in the Spectator, of which Neil is the chairman: an exercise of Jones’s free speech rights that John Stuart Mill would have recognised as a paradigm.Owen Jones, meanwhile, is subject to an endless stream of vitriol from politicians and journalists, as well as ordinary Twitter users, and was assaulted by a man on the extreme right who recognised him in a ...”

“... Yet he, too, makes of the poet what the title of one of his book’s most appreciative reviews, John Carey’s, called ‘The Hollow Man’. Moreover this is not, in Ackroyd’s case, a mere technicality, an unfortunate function of the concept of biography as necessarily external. His Life firmly presents Eliot as characterised by an essential emptiness at ...”

“... to grab hold. Olympia’s own oracle centred on the annually increasing mountain of mud, ash, animal parts and flies which was the great sacrificial altar of Zeus; it was this oracle which allowed Olympia to be celebrated as ‘Mistress of Truth’, as it says on the new Olympic medals. Pindar explains why Olympia is so called, ‘the place where ...”

“... imagination Carter may perform, she always comes to rest in the right ideological position,’ John Bayley wrote in a notoriously slighting 1992 review: the ballet idea works well, but otherwise he’s a bit tin-eared. A ‘moral pornographer’, Carter called herself sometimes; she could also have called herself an ideological choreographer. It’s not ...”

“... the second came at the age of 17 when, having fallen in love with ‘The Hollow Men’ and ‘Ash Wednesday’, I bought Eliot’s Collected Poems and came upon Bleistein and Rachel née Rabinovitch; the first had happened at the age of ten when on my first visit to the Old Vic I saw Hamlet debunk Polonius by calling him a fishmonger. And then at school ...”

“... with the job, the baton passed to civil servants and to a junior minister responsible for energy, John Battle. Battle was from Leeds, a Catholic and an activist for social justice whose life until that point – studying the poetry of William Empson, training for the priesthood, setting up Church Action on Poverty to campaign for a minimum wage and mastering ...”

“... the European Commission and other national governments were baffled by and suspicious of what John Sheail, in his history of British environmentalism, calls ‘the concept of making payments to farmers to farm below the maximum’. There were mutterings that it was illegal. But the commission came round, and Europe took up the concept. For the first ...”