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“... more than Chernobyl, and a fall in the price of oil which turned the terms of trade in the only major Soviet commodity against him. Much of his difficulty, however, was the result of his own, and his Party’s, failure to grasp that there could be no middle way between Communism and capitalism. Communism may be qualified, as it had been in Hungary since the ...”

“... power whatever) is capable of doing a great deal of harm; and Unger himself acknowledges that any major project of social transformation may well turn out to be massively and brutally unsuccessful in practice. But it certainly does not follow that there is nothing important to be learnt from his urgent and idiosyncratic voice. Like most radical social ...”

“... preface to this celebratory volume of essays presented to Dame Helen Gardner on her 70th birthday, John Carey apologises for the fact that the topics discussed are restricted to 16th and 17th-century English literature. Dame Helen’s latest book, after all, was The Composition of ‘The Four Quartets’. Eliot’s presence, though, still hovers over ...”

“... Insane. His visitor this time is 25-year-old Clarice Starling, an FBI trainee with a double major in psychology and criminology from the University of Virginia. (This, incidentally, is one of Harris’s rare factual mistakes: the University of Virginia doesn’t offer a criminology major.) She has been sent ostensibly ...”

“... of nine-tenths of the stuff that gets written nowadays about Eng. Lit. A fascinating and major paradox is involved; but what would be the point of the author displaying it when a fabulous gathering of fictional puzzles will do it for him? The best critic, like the best novelist, leaves the reader to decide. The paradox remains, however. On the one ...”

“... his own surviving letters. Sterne was hardly the first vain author, but he was perhaps the first major English writer who declined to play the old games of gentlemanly reticence or high-minded modesty. At last, we see an author who does not pretend to be above the market, who unreservedly enjoys popularity. At last, someone who does not regret that all sorts ...”

“... Bill, where he studied English and edited the Daily Bruin (Watergate conspirators Bob Haldeman and John Ehrlichman were his arch-enemies on the paper). By then, he’d already been part of the Allied occupation of Germany pulling bodies out of the rubble, gone AWOL to attend the Nuremberg Trials (with the intention of assassinating Hermann Göring) and worked ...”

“... gradualism and extrapolation by smooth continuity from causes of change in local populations to major trends and transitions in the history of life. A new and general evolutionary theory will embody this notion of hierarchy and stress a variety of themes either ignored or explicitly rejected by the modern synthesis. These quotations come from a recent ...”

“... has now disappeared to be replaced by another, this time by the succeeding general editors, John Barnard and Paul Hammond. They claim fidelity to Bateson except where he has come to seem fallible. For instance, he insisted on modernising spelling and punctuation; but why modernise Browning, and why meddle with Marvell’s punctuation, which is important ...”

“... to sit on so that at least I could force a smile’), Prescott and his bulimia. Cherie Blair and John Prescott may not have been the most unpopular figures of Blair’s government but they were the two who had the hardest time in the press. Both spent long stretches in the contemporary equivalent of the stocks; a scarring experience, and both of them were ...”

“... was an untapped market for ‘erotic fiction written by women for women’ – Femporn. Since John Cleland, men have written pornography for men under female pseudonyms: a tradition which had been continued by Nexus. But this would be the real thing. The Black Lace imprint was launched in July 1993. It has been a success. Between two and three million ...”

“... and if his grasp of the context is loose, we may be nervous about his judgment on matters of major fact. The chief cause of nervousness appears in his subtitle: ‘Poet and Spy’. We are to imagine that these two aspects of Marlowe’s life are equivalent, or equally established. They are not. Marlowe the poet is a luminous fact; Marlowe the spy is a ...”

“... Police. In the last few years, the country’s largest police force has experienced a series of major scandals. In June 2021, an official report into the Met’s failure to solve the 1987 murder of a private investigator called Daniel Morgan accused the force of ‘institutional corruption’. Morgan was found with an axe in his head in the car park of a ...”

“... to Greece. Tony mentions in the poem her absent friends: George Devine, Ron Eyre, Tony Richardson, John and John (Dexter and Osborne), and at the conclusion a cake is brought in and Jocelyn is crowned with laurels. It could be thought pretentious but since Jocelyn is so far from pretentious it seems both fitting and moving.I ...”

“... The major contribution of the English theatre to last year’s Brecht centenary was Lee Hall’s dazzling version of Mr Puntila and His Man Matti, presented by the Right Size, a touring company led by the comic actors Sean Foley and Hamish McColl. Their prologue goes some way to explaining why the Anglophone response to the Brechtfest was so muted ...”