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“... has it, was brought to him mid-set). ‘At the peak of its popularity in the 16th century,’ David Berry writes in his history of tennis, ‘Paris alone had 250 courts, including one at the Louvre and another at Versailles, the latter of which was occupied in the revolution of 1789 by the Third Estate as a symbolic protest at the elitist nature of this ...”

“... sound was heard . . . The Arts Minister was being praised. By ‘Arts Minister’ he presumably means Chris Smith, the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, rather than Alan Howarth, the Arts Minister and ex-Tory, but you can hardly blame Lord Bragg for his confusion: when Smith took over the post from Virginia Bottomley in May 1997, he was ...”

“... between cowboy operators and the HSE, the HSE always has to concede, because it has very few means of checking the credentials of either employers or their workers. It is also the case that the regulations do not do anything to solve the problem of the extended periods of unemployment that can push a man into illegal work. Beneath the trumpeted headlines ...”

“... But the idea is not the point. Or not the whole point. The point is the performance which, by means of the line written under a pronoun, overrides – such is the urgency of the message it bears – the conventions of ordinary language. Kipling himself bristles in that mark of the pen. Mrs Hill will find him there, will acknowledge him there. Since she ...”

“... poetic and critical discourse. What exactly, then, is Lentricchia up to? It’s possible that he means to extend and revise Hugh Kenner’s magisterial survey, The Pound Era (1971), in the light of more recent theoretical and literary-historical preoccupations. Like Kenner, he clearly regards the Modernist enterprise, with its insistence on ‘radical ...”

“... to someone who once worked for Nick Clegg tell him he doesn’t understand what democracy really means. But there he was, looking both older and younger than his years.He answered with patience the inevitable questions about whether he believed the Labour Party under Keir Starmer has what it takes to win the next election. He suggested that to seal the deal ...”

“... attributes of genius. Another is that its operation entails lateral thinking. Another is that it means being a medium rather than a maker: the inventiveness of those who have genius does not seem to come from them but through them. An artist can be touched with genius without becoming a great artist. And the artist of genius can be a hedgehog or a fox. When ...”

“... these inhabitants of the New World. The content of the Book, however, was less startling than its means of production: it had, Smith claimed, been translated from gold tablets that he unearthed from a local hillside. Smith, a farmer’s son, said he’d been directed to the hill by an angel, and the book was therefore evidence of Smith’s own status as a ...”

“... So it seems a wilful blindness to decide that Oppenheimer is Best Picture when that verdict means passing on several more coherent films – for me, that includes Poor Things, The Zone of Interest and Past Lives, all of which are nominated, but none of which feels American. The crack in the promise of the Academy Awards is that American pictures don’t ...”

“... in a poor town in Virginia, finds himself branded as ‘gifted’ by a perceptive teacher. This means that he has ‘to do the harder English, which was a time suck, reading books’. By this stage of the novel, you know that he secretly respects good teachers and real learning, and that his scorn for academic endeavour is just bravado. Soon enough he is ...”

“... of his seniors, the condemnation of his critics, and the faint sniggers of academics offstage. David Owen has had his prescription for Britain patronised by Grimond and Powell, dissected by Ken Coates, and treated like a first-year undergraduate’s essay by Professor Peter Townsend. With his publishers bringing its publication forward to catch the ...”

“... greatest bond that unites those awaiting execution. Stafford-Smith claims that ‘nobody with the means to pay for an effective defence ever ends up on Death Row.’ Of those currently on Death Row none could afford private representation, and all had to have a court-appointed attorney. Stafford-Smith maintains that unless a particular case is going to ...”

“... David Keenan’s​ first novel, This Is Memorial Device: An Hallucinated Oral History of the Post-Punk Scene in Airdrie, Coatbridge and Environs 1978-86 (2017), documents the rise and fall of a fictitious (though awesomely real) band called Memorial Device. Its members are from Keenan’s home town of Airdrie – about thirteen miles east of Glasgow – and the book takes the form of 26 testimonies from band members, friends, jilted lovers, relatives, hangers-on and rival acts ...”

“... even North America, protect him from the charge of parochialism. Even so, one is left wishing that means could be found to take him round on circuit, so that more of England at least could be brought under his penetrating gaze. One area he is evidently unfamiliar with is the western edge of the Weald, that very distinctive belt of abruptly precipitous ...”

“... the emotional connection is so obvious that it scarcely needs pointing out: to him, being British means, among other things, not being European. Less obviously, his attitudes to England, English literature and English history also help to explain his otherwise baffling inability to understand his opponents on the opposite side of the argument. For the ...”