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“... The career of the last German Kaiser is littered with effusions of this kind. They range from the gross and offensive to the bizarre or merely foolish. Wilhelm II spent most of his waking hours talking, arguing, shouting, speechifying, preaching, threatening and generally unbosoming himself of his latest preoccupations to whoever happened to be within ...”

“... government of responsibility; a Conservative minority declared the government guilty of gross impropriety. It was clear that a more independent process was needed. When, in 1921, there were allegations that officials in the Ministry of Munitions had destroyed documents relating to procurement contracts, Parliament legislated for a system of public ...”

“... though the inner circle of his admirers was composed of dummies: Berlin, Betjeman, Kenneth Clark, John Sparrow, as well as, a little later, Noel Annan and Stuart Hampshire – all capable of the odd spot of talking themselves. But they acknowledged Bowra as their master, which was fortunate since no other terms were on offer. With the young, Bowra’s ...”

“... wisdom of Egyptian Masonry. Lefkowitz could also see that these arguments were being supported by gross errors of fact, such as the idea that Aristotle had plundered the Egyptian library at Alexandria as a basis for his own writings, whereas the library had actually been founded by Macedonian Greeks at least thirty years after Aristotle’s death. One might ...”

“... to Henry Moore’s drawings of bodies in the London air-raid shelters.) I do not know whether this gross exegesis is offensive or risible. I do know hat there was nothing further from Sophocles’s mind in the opening line of the Antigone than a little sisterly soixante-neuf. Steiner’s thought and language are influenced by his esteem for that master of ...”

“... different kinds of penis in art, and a strong contrast seems always to have been drawn between the gross members of satyrs and comic actors in Dionysus’ entourage and the very modest manhood of heroic and civic ideal. Sometimes the phallus seems even to have a life of its own. It appears as a bird, with eyes and wings, or with four legs and a tail as a ...”

“... or Kafka – the most ‘impressive’ names on his bookshelf are Isaac Asimov, Ursula Le Guin and John Wyndham – but at a village meeting to discuss what to do about a proposed Gypsy campsite, he reflects that ‘the villagers wanted the Gypsies to be gross, so the grossness of what they’re not acts as a stencil for ...”

“... it has become meaningless: urchins, smuts, back-to-backs, urban indigence, foundlings, gluttony, gross sentimentality – they all answer to it. To evoke a society through reference to its most distinguished, most protean artists is usually a hazardous enterprise. In seeking a record or snapshot it disregards the manipulations, the omissions, the wild ...”

“... God could have let this happen and a renewal of faith that would include pardoning God for his gross lapse and expressing that forgiveness literally, physically, by placing the celebrant among, rather than in front of, the congregation so that it might be closer to the host that had been magically rendered tangible, subject to sight and touch and scent.The ...”

“... is taking in revenue and what it is spending. That’s worse than Greece. In 2008-9, we had gross debt amounting to 55 per cent of GDP; by 2010-11 we will hit 82 per cent. In plain English, we’ve gone into debt at a speed never before achieved, and have built up debts never before seen in peacetime. The foot is on the floor and the needle is in the ...”

“... like Wilson and Blair – by not being about anything.The prominent British political theorist John Gray has also been seen as chameleonic. His passage from Mill to Hayek to Berlin (he has written books on each of them) has prompted charges of swaying with the wind or, still less charitably, being a Vicar of Bray. The Hayek phase coincided with ...”

“... enforced in the 1950s. Indictable offences for sodomy, bestiality, indecent assault and ‘gross indecency’ rose sharply in the late 1940s and early 1950s and there were a number of high-profile court cases – notably the trials of Lord Montagu, Bill Field (a promising Labour MP) and, most tragically, Alan Turing, the progenitor of modern ...”

“... mutual regard between the two leaders. Eden’s turn against Nasser came with the dismissal of Sir John Glubb as Chief of Staff of the Arab Legion in March 1956. Glubb Pasha, writes Kyle, ‘was a British newspaper reader’s legend’. With his fall the reality of Britain’s diminished role in the Middle East suddenly struck home. Eden, it should be ...”

“... to face the fact that of all his old associates his most constant fellow-traveller has been the gross careerist, Widmerpool. Ironies of this kind may be allowed to affect the occasional writing too. Powell distinguishes between ‘gifted people’ and ‘hacks’. But, like Nick and Widmerpool, gifted people and hacks may be in some ways opposed, in other ...”

“... had treated of them dispersed. For another, they were increasingly caricatured as decadent and gross: pursuit of bathhouse boys was seen as a symptom of undesirable excess. And, as Plutarch emphasised, the role of the boy in such relations came to be thought of as anomalous (the pleasures lacked reciprocity) and without honour. To what did these ...”