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“... work of many novelists who started publishing fiction in the 1950s – Butor and Murdoch but also Anthony Burgess, William Golding, Muriel Spark and Pynchon – and who were not just trying to make sense of our lives but, as Kermode put it, ‘making sense of the ways we try to make sense of our lives’.For Murray, ‘a real Pynchon thing’ is the mode of ...”

“... proving himself a cunning ‘politician’ in the precise pejorative sense used by Shakespeare in King Lear: ‘Get thee glass eyes,/And, like a scurvy politician, seem/To see the things thou dost not.’ So while the message of these texts is clear enough, their provenance makes them hard to interpret. The proportion of truth and invention in them cannot be ...”

“... City by selling to its new arts centre for $50,000 a huge painting entitled The Temptation of St Anthony which consists of a single vertical stripe on a plain ground, utters a startling self-defence: It is a picture of the self-awareness of every animal. It is the immaterial core of every animal – the ‘I am’ to which all messages are sent. It is all ...”

“... Chronicles, weren’t seen to count as historical: the play originally printed as The History of King Lear had to be reclassified as a tragedy (just as the erstwhile tragedies of Richard II and Richard III became histories), and was joined by Cymbeline, despite that play’s competing affinities with history and with comedy. Other potential anomalies ...”

“... artists or canonical masterpieces’. There can be no room in such a project for artists such as Anthony Devis, adjudged by Waterhouse to be ‘an altogether minor person’; or those whom it is ‘sufficient to mention’ but unnecessary to discuss; or the numerous and nameless ‘journeymen hacks’ who ‘cannot find a place in a general history of ...”

“... of which his contemporary heroes – the painters I’ve mentioned, or the English sculptor Anthony Caro – were the exponents, Fried seemed set to search out the background to this progressive history. But it’s hardly surprising that, once in the academy, Fried imbibed a different view of history, one that is properly historicist in the sense that ...”

“... instead. It was, to be sure, easier to make these claims of, say, Rainer Maria Rilke than of Anthony Trollope, not to speak of Shopping and Fucking. Like most theories of art, Romanticism and its heirs privileged one particular form of it – in this case, poetry, which had taken up where religion had left off. As I.A. Richards remarked with stunning ...”

“... absent: she also had a habit of physically vanishing. Another of the boyfriends would be King Farouk of Egypt, whom she met while working as a cipher clerk in Cairo in 1944. He liked to flog her with his dressing-gown cord on the steps of his palace. She was dangerously beautiful – the danger being for herself as much as for others. The ‘romantic ...”

“... wilderness – sometimes presciently, as on Germany, sometimes ludicrously, as in support of the King over abdication – without getting back into office. From young man in a hurry to old codger going nowhere: his hour on the stage of history seemed to be over. If anything, Ramsden goes further than Rhodes James. In itself 1940 was not a lasting ...”

“... with one occasional diarist, setting out from the memorial to Harold II, the last Anglo-Saxon king, sited where the high altar of Waltham Abbey once stood, for a five-day tramp to another heritage marker at Battle Abbey. And on, strength permitting, to the marble effigy of the slaughtered English warrior who is cradled, in serpentine embrace, by his lover ...”

“... unknown for the prime minister not to chair Cobra when he or she is in London. According to David King, the former government chief scientific adviser, Blair and Brown never failed to chair a Cobra meeting. Johnson failed five times in a row, always on the subject of Covid. The reason isn’t far to seek: he didn’t understand it and didn’t take it ...”

“... I decided I would stop concealing that myself.’ On 1 October 1969, aided by his Rand colleague Anthony Russo and using a primitive Xerox machine in the office of Russo’s friend Lynda Sinay, the owner of a small advertising agency, Ellsberg began his monumental task. Working through the night, he and his friends would copy 47 volumes of the Pentagon ...”

“... anything even faintly obscene, a campaign that among other cases saw the artist Donald McGill, king of the seaside postcard, briefly banged up for his depiction of an outsize, almost vertical stick of rock’. How far this prudishness in the public culture was mirrored in private life is hard to gauge, but Kynaston presents enough evidence to suggest that ...”

“... were beginning their work, there appeared in print a brief Oriental story about three sons of the King of Serendip, who could tell the identity of a lost animal simply by reading its tracks. Tried as wizards, the three brothers successfully demonstrated the method they used and escaped punishment. The same story was told in the 18th century, prompting Horace ...”

“... K’ang-Hsi, a contemporary of Louis XIV (although by K’ang-Hsi’s imperial standards the Sun King was a mere barbarian princeling). The book is not a biography but a portrait, indeed a kind of self-portrait, an attempt to explore K’ang-Hsi’s mind by making a kind of jigsaw or mosaic of the Emperor’s personal opinions, which are to be found ...”