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“... or her – place. A lovely thing. 31 December. Because some 25 years ago The Madness of King George was nominated for an Oscar, around Christmas we generally get a clutch of DVDs soliciting votes for the next year’s awards. Today it’s Call Me by Your Name, which has been much lauded, so much so that when we come to watch it this rather gets in the ...”

“... and the counter-revolution exist not only in the world at large but also within himself. As George Orwell really did say in another context, it would almost be worth being dead to have something like that written about you. And in The Great Melody, O’Brien expanded upon some of these themes, without actually expanding them very much. Yet here we have ...”

“... associate Friedrich Nietzsche, a visionary who lacked any ‘regulating force for his dream-bird flight’. If Burckhardt had shown admirable discipline, sticking ‘within the boundaries of his own mission’, Nietzsche had refused to acknowledge any conceptual or empirical limits, and was swallowed by the flames. Seeing correctly required a secure ...”

“... helpless, turned on its back, legs pedalling. Anna was delighted: one rodent fewer to poison. The bird flew up to the shed roof, the better to enjoy its morsel. A passing squirrel startled it. The dying or dead mouse fell from its grip and rolled down the mildewed slope. London anticipates disaster. And, in that fearful anticipation, incubates it. Visible ...”

“... wind-honed archipelago. Many of them are inhabited. The islands are whale-shapes, as their poet George Mackay Brown noted. Few trees impede the wind. Water, salt and fresh, in wide bays or lochs or channels, is always to hand, lightening and softening the land it encircles. The land is fertile, the people prosperous, Norse, liberal, and they live in two ...”

“... the happiest of all Jane Austen’s pastorals. Emma, like a Maeterlinck heroine, finds the Blue Bird of happiness is at home all the time, and it only requires a small change and improvement in her moral character to make her discover it. But few children are actually carried and born in pastoral. What, then, is Anna Weston doing forging her way through ...”

“... and means good. ‘We would rather have “Fra Lippo Lippi” than an essay on Realism in Art,’ George Eliot said in her warm and insightful review of Men and Women, the collection in which the poem was published, without question Browning’s masterpiece. She singled out for similar admiration a passage from another poem in the book, ‘How It Strikes a ...”

“... having read it, and all the other reviews as well:Reviewing Martin Amis is like trying to hear a bird sing in the midst of an artillery duel. ‘Most powerful, wonderful, titanic English novelist alive’ boom the guns of one side. ‘Talentless, jumped-up, nepotistic little nobody’ comes the answering fire.What is Mr Ableman to think? ‘The long-term ...”

“... others (see Dick Cheney). But it only happens when the president decides to let it happen (see George W. Bush). No one can bring power to the office by their own efforts. Johnson tried in the early days, throwing his weight around in the Democratic caucus in the Senate as though nothing had changed. He was politely, and then less politely, ignored. He ...”

“... to be grossly exploited when you can buy a small British chicken in Aldi for £1.87 and a medium bird for £3. The president of the British Veterinary Association and the head of food policy at Which? continue to insist that chlorine-washing chickens does mask dodgy animal husbandry and that rates of foodborne disease are far higher in the US.Nor are things ...”

“... with a sprinkling of other Catholics. Making his way on personal magnetism, ‘he could charm a bird out of a tree’, a friend recalled. For years he had been attracted to Rose Fitzgerald, according to Nasaw ‘the most famous and surely one of the prettiest Catholic girls in the city’, though even the loyal Perry admits that ‘her Boston accent, and ...”

“... much given to personal revelation, but the essentials are there. In a folio on the aerodynamics of bird-flight, squeezed unceremoniously into a corner, we find the famous note about his ‘first memory’ (or, as Freud preferred, fantasy): ‘It seemed to me, when I was in my cradle, that a kite came to me, and opened my mouth with its tail, and struck me ...”

“... heard the news of the President’s assassination, ‘without a pause she said: "My God, Lady Bird in the White House. We can’t use her in the magazine!"’ Vreeland was almost 60 when she became editor of Vogue in 1962; she could easily have spent the next ten years foisting her snobbery and general foolishness in full colour on the American public ...”

“... of a ‘new company of courtly makers’. They had, the Elizabethan literary historian George Puttenham wrote, ‘travailed into Italie, and there tasted the sweet and stately measures and style of the Italian poesie’, and so ‘greatly polished our rude and homely manner of vulgar poesie’. Wyatt’s sonnet ‘Whoso list to hunt, I know where ...”

“... repulsive, and dressed in an outlandish way. The poet Jean Tortel remembered her as ‘a kind of bird without a body, withdrawn, in a huge black cloak which she never took off and which flapped around her calves’. Weil never defined herself as a woman, any more than as a Jew.She graduated from the École Normale Supérieure in 1931, during the brief prewar ...”