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“... to be masculine he’s all straight lines he’s rule and measure a rigid prick or as Carlos Williams notes there are plenty men whose heads resemble nothing so much as the head of a dick which is how I came to see John Cadmus III sitting at the wheel of his pickup truck in a parking lot outside a Safeway foodstore in ...”

“... through his fiction just as it flowed through the city itself. There’s a strong whiff of Emlyn Williams ham in all this and one reaches for Trollope’s prissy ‘Of Dickens’s style it is impossible to speak in praise. It is jerky, ungrammatical, and created by himself in defiance of rules ... No young novelist should ever dare to imitate the style of ...”

“... reproduction of Balthasar Denner’s 1721 painting Alte Frau to a touching remembrance of the late John Berger to a dual meditation on ageing – ‘the great unsexing’, as she calls it, ‘the disappearance of gender, over time’ – and the unencumbered way her father thought about art. All this makes her ask of herself: ‘Who am I to speak of this ...”

“... hitherto regarded as talentless, overrated, or simply wankers: Oasis, the Stones, Paul McCartney, John Lennon, Robbie Williams, Kingsley Amis, Martin Amis, Evelyn Waugh, Auberon Waugh, Salman Rushdie, Jeffrey Archer, Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, William Shakespeare (although to be fair they despise the comedies and some of the ...”

“... with colleagues like Cecil Sharp (whose ideas about folk-song were later endorsed by Vaughan Williams) were superficially about Grainger’s pioneering use of the phonograph. But Sharp’s hard-nosed rejection of the infernal machine as the only means of accurately transcribing folk-song had less to do with practicalities (Grainger’s transcriptions ...”

“... a peasant-servant repeats the central plot-device of Godwin’s allegory of class conflict, Caleb Williams. These early reviewers simplified the book they had to deal with. Baldick’s more careful comparison of Mary Shelley’s protagonists with those of any model in the 1790s shows that her sympathies are unusually evenly distributed, her message complex ...”

“... been in part written by, and supervised by, a philosopher, the chairman of the Committee, Bernard Williams. Philosophy does many things, some plainly useful and some rather remote from common concerns: but at least it always leaves in the mind of those who have studied it an ever-ready set of warning bells, a nagging sense of intellectual insecurity, and of ...”

“... of Ethics, a work that philosophers still mine, and the model for modern masterpieces such as John Rawls’s Theory of Justice and Derek Parfit’s Reasons and Persons. But Sidgwick was one of those terrifyingly hard-working Victorians whose day job was a small part of what they got through, and although his moral philosophy gets very adequate treatment ...”

“... as a monumental study of ‘the man and his socialism’. It is repeatedly contrasted with Philip Williams’s biography of Gaitskell, always in order to say how much better Foot’s book is – it being understood that Foot was a Bevanite, Williams a Gaitskellite. Once in full flow Morgan writes in the same windy, cadenced ...”

“... figure. A belief in his national importance led to his refusal in 1794 to visit his radical friend John Thelwall – when Thelwall was in Newgate charged with treason – on the grounds that Godwin must not jeopardise his own life, ‘this treasure which does not belong to me but to the public’. It is hard not to be reminded of the passage Jane Austen had ...”

“... Windsors and the Georgetown ladies, and master in novel-form of the Washington of Henry Adams, John Hay and Teddy Roosevelt.Or is it so fitting? On second thoughts, is not Vidal a natural for the Protestant cemetery in Rome, hard by Keats and Shelley and Gramsci and Labriola, and sheltered, in serene pagan and Mediterranean style, by the pyramid of ...”

“... a kind of 24-hour coverage in case there was ‘anything that can be done’. He sent a letter to John Lanchester dated ‘Christmas Eve, 2000’. Lanchester eventually met Silvers in London. ‘He’d flown in on the red-eye,’ John told me, ‘was doing this dinner at the Ivy, then spending the whole next day at the ...”

“... Sir John Gielgud is 75. To hear him talk or watch him on the stage he seems much younger, whereas his recollections of the lions of the Edwardian theatre ought to put him well past his century. It’s an elastic life because baby Gielgud was so quick off the mark, the famous nose soon round the edge of the pram observing the odd behaviour of his Terry uncles and aunts ...”

“... book dealer’s but manage to come away with one cheap paperback, it turns out to be Caleb Williams, William Godwin’s archetypal story of a pursuit, which the bandit embraces as his chance finally to learn English. Echenoz’s educated in-jokes are a nice way of destabilising his characters and disarming their pretensions as hard men. Whether, on the ...”

“... in relation, for example, to the recent thinking of philosophers like David Wiggins and Bernard Williams, Derek Parfit, Thomas Nagel and Charles Taylor. (It might also be even harder.) As it is, there seem to be no grounds for optimism at all. For more than a quarter of a century I have found Alasdair MacIntyre the most stirring and the most imaginatively ...”