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“... companies merged and were taken over by Glaxo in the 1960s and MacFarlan Smith has been part of Johnson Matthey Fine Chemicals since 2001. Welsh also punctuated the Skagboys storyline with a series of bulletins called ‘Notes on an Epidemic’. Some of these have factual points to make about drugs and HIV in 1980s Edinburgh: Thatcher, unemployment, the ...”

“... or as liberation.’ Beer recognises the importance of German writers for Carlyle: not only Jean Paul Richter’s liberating (or vandalising) fantastic qualities, but also Kant’s more formidable ones. Beer suggests that Carlyle’s ‘balked reading’ of Kant made the latter ‘a vigorous figure within Carlyle’s intellectual dramas’. It is an ...”

“... but eggs benedict, or scrambled eggs and bacon. But there is also poetry in the genuinely exotic. Paul Levy once held out reverently to me between his finger and thumb a small object, of indeterminate colour, and urged me to bite it. It tasted of nothing at all, but when I pointed this out he brushed the objection away with tolerant disdain. ‘That is smoked ...”

“... detectable before 1914, were suddenly fanned into life. The greatest of the prewar couturiers, Paul Poiret, had predicted that by 1958 women would be wearing trousers. In fact they were wearing them by the 1920s, both literally and figuratively. French couture between the wars was dominated, as never before or since, by female designers: Jeanne ...”

“... us a sober, useful historical treatment of the development of the concept of structure; Barbara Johnson lucidly recounts the steps by which ‘writing’ came to mean what it now means, though ends with the revolutionary claim that ‘what is at stake in writing is the very structure of authority itself’; Paul Bové ...”

“... and car crashes, he finally made it to AP’s Washington Bureau in the summer of 1965. Lyndon Johnson had just stage-managed the Gulf of Tonkin incident into a congressional carte blanche that would dramatically widen the US war in Vietnam. Hersh, soon the senior AP man in Washington, was quickly introduced to the mendacity at the heart of the war. In ...”

“... been imagined as able to tell it. The Scottish Philosophe Lord Monboddo was teased by Dr Johnson for asserting the intellectual claims of animals, then shouted down for going too far with his conjecturalist hunch that humans without language (and possibly with tails) must still exist, happy and hidden. Returning us with superior weapons to this ...”

“... parody of Pamela’s writing-to-the-moment technique as the pen drops in homage to the penis. Paul-Gabriel Boucé’s essay on ‘Chthonic and Pelagic Metaphorisation in Eighteenth-Century English Erotica’ is a virtuoso display of linguistic excarnation, turning the flesh into the word. For Boucé sex is lexis; a vagina is never merely a vagina, but a ...”

“... Brownstones leaves Brooklyn for Barbados, where her father had inherited a plot of land. And Avey Johnson in Praisesong for the Widow digs deep into her past, and that of her ancestors in South Carolina, to replenish it and make it usable. The Final Passage is a small story by comparison, and only partially illuminates its theme. There is sadness ...”

“... at the University of Texas was one of the two principal sponsors (along with the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library), although the president and staff of the hyper-rich Pennzoil Company and sundry U of T outfits are also thanked for their ‘support’. America may be undergoing Thirdworldisation but it cannot catch up with Britain’s faster progress. Thus ...”

“... so I’ve decided to stop being one. After a while we got his new business card: Lanchester Jean-Paul Monet. You’re getting more French, we said, but you can’t speak French. I’m working on it, he said: the key lifestyle decision is the name change. You have to call me ‘Lanchester’ now. What with work, Arthur, the gym, the shooting classes and ...”

“... Financial Times he called the number of Old Etonians at Number 10 ‘preposterous’, following Jo Johnson’s promotion to head of the Policy Unit. Always in the background lurked Gove’s friend and adviser Cummings, whom Cameron suspected of whispering poison into his master’s ear. Things finally came to a head in 2016, when Gove went to see Cameron and ...”

“... is fine. Indeed, ‘we might see Bloom as a proper hero of sexual modernity for, since Masters and Johnson, masturbation has become a familiar index of sexual normality, or, as one historian puts it, “the ultimate criterion of correct social behaviour”.’ (The historian, I learn a hundred pages later, is ...”

“... rather than present self-loathing. He might have added that for the supposedly anti-fleshly St Paul, it is the sexual coupling of bodies which symbolises the relationship between Christ and his people, and that in Christian tradition celibacy is meant to be a sacrifice. Since it is no sacrifice to surrender what you regard as worthless, Christian ascetism ...”

“... has its roots in the New Critics’ preoccupation with the metaphysical poets, and what Samuel Johnson called their yoking together of heterogeneous ideas by violence, but it also reflects the attitudes of someone trained to believe that bread is flesh and God. Donoghue’s main claims are that metaphor ‘invokes things disgracefully far apart’ and that ...”