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“... the pub until it closed. The man with the greatest incentive to call ‘time’, his heir-apparent Anthony Eden, lacked the nerve and nastiness to do so. On numerous occasions Churchill toughed it out with his frustrated deputy, conning Eden into handling most of the Parliamentary business while he maintained titular leadership of the Party (and got on with ...”

“... nationalism ‘springs, inevitably, from the requirements of a modern economy’. Critics such as Anthony Smith (once Gellner’s student) have argued that this determinedly modernist account underplays the role both of actual historic continuities and of the emotions that make nationalism more than a set of bureaucratic edicts. Or as Anderson puts ...”

“... he is known to have offered the ‘Roman murder story’ to a number of his friends (including Anthony Trollope and Tennyson) and the idea that he himself might make something of it seems to have come to him only after Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s death in 1861 and his return to England later the same year. The poem, whose roots go back to Browning’s ...”

“... and reluctant reply from a steward (I never met this man, but his prose style suggested tight cross-gartering). His Lordship was away indefinitely: the house was shut up and empty: my request could not be entertained. I did go to Wimborne St Giles one day while I was revising the doctorate as a book, just to double-check whether there was a visible ...”

“... historical characters got a tick if they were on the side of liberty (Cromwell, Chatham), a cross (Charles I, James II) if they held up the march of progress. Because he went in for active royalty and made some attempt to govern on his own account rather than leaving it to the Whig aristocracy, George III had been written up as a villain and a clumsy ...”

“... identity is characterised not by imperial nostalgia, as such commentators as Fintan O’Toole and Anthony Barnett have suggested, but by a more inchoate sense of communal ‘loss’. Loss of what? ‘One part of the Englishman’s burden of the three Celtic statelets was to eschew a patriotism that was other than British, or a flag that was other than the ...”

“... Mills, Pine and Gilmore, Thomas Frank), and even a few socio-economic ones (Ulrich Beck, Anthony Giddens). The point is, however, not necessarily to endorse these (many are standard culture critiques), but rather to indicate the direction in which literary theory opens onto other disciplines. Class analysis is meanwhile omnipresent, and plagued as ...”

“... physical urges are hard to combat,’ he says. That much is nothing new: Jesus and St Anthony knew it very well. But Atkins’s conclusion is staunchly democratic: ‘Fighting the scale armed only with willpower and determination works, at best, for only five low-fat dieters out of a hundred.’ If, however, we use the best nutritional science, we ...”

“... theory were already creating a self-contained alternative political thought space conducive to the cross-fertilisation of conspiracist ideas. Covid-19 and government efforts to control it – an extreme event, accompanied by what can seem baffling and intrusive restrictions – appear, in the conspiracist mind, as the most open moves yet by a secret group of ...”

“... and Mr Johnson has them ‘crossing into Lebanon’. In the same way, no doubt, did the Russians cross into Afghanistan and the Germans enter Poland. The little matter of the entry into Lebanon costing some twenty-five thousand lives is discreetly omitted. In 1982 Israel’s indiscriminate bombardment of Beirut caused heavy civilian casualties. Yet for an ...”

“... Penelope Mortimer arrived to interview him for the Observer magazine in 1978, she could barely cross the threshold. Dunsmuir calmly explained that ‘the front door had been off its hinges for some time and it was difficult to get things fixed.’ Graham’s living conditions were a satire on the whole idea of having a home or feeling at home: when the ...”

“... of the church’. For the updated view, she links to a recent book by another vicar, Justin Lewis-Anthony, with the unbeatable title If You Meet George Herbert on the Road, Kill Him: Radically Rethinking Priestly Ministry. Both these ministers are products of a Church of England that has adapted to an England in which religious freedom is a given. Churches ...”

“... lies not least with the actors: Anne Heche and Vince Vaughn are no match for Janet Leigh and Anthony Perkins. Haneke’s American remake of Funny Games, even closer to the original movie in story and shot arrangement, is also inferior, and again the actors are a primary reason. The villains aren’t quite right in their social demeanour: Funny Games is a ...”

“... ego. The most famous and successful venture in homosexual ventriloquism by a novelist is still Anthony Burgess’s Earthly Powers. I had doubts about the book when it came out in 1980, disliking the easy equation of homosexuality with cowardliness, even though this was an equation accepted by many homosexuals of the generation of Burgess’s octogenarian ...”

“... by means of the divine manipulation of threads, comes right up to the edge of comedy but doesn’t cross over. Comedy offers release, and there is to be no release for Jay Justus and his siblings, and none for the reader. This is a repetitive book, and some of the redundancy could have been editorially trimmed – the phrase ‘Mother Land’ loses all force ...”