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“... to American imperialism is sustained chiefly through such US exports as Chomsky, Gore Vidal and Michael Moore. But although his recent examples come from the war on terror, the political development they represent is not, according to Agamben, peculiar to the United States under the Bush presidency. It is part of a wider change in governance in which the ...”

“... time is teasingly twisted, like a Möbius strip. That would perhaps not be a fair description of Michael Dibdin’s The Tryst, but it is nevertheless a novel of complex structure, the recurrent theme of which is the operation of the past in the present. ‘The past is dead,’ psychiatrist Aileen Macklin tells her young patient, Steven Bradley. ‘It’s ...”

“... and he says things like that again and again. They shake my faith in the man’s reasoning powers till it totters. The same applies to his poetry. When he starts picking at a philosophic or didactic vein, the poem totters and often falls down. Patrick Kavanagh’s life was a sad, not to say miserable one, with real poverty his closest neighbour, with ...”

“... on the old. Aristotle saw the particular difficulty of judging the conduct of old people whose powers are failing by the criteria of virtuous behaviour appropriate to maturity. King Lear being an obvious case in point, Small gives an elaborate account of it. Is Lear mentally and morally impaired when he divides his kingdom? If he is so, and continues to be ...”

“... Yet it is only the two and a half years from July 1914 to Asquith’s fall in December 1916 that Michael and Eleanor Brock have chosen to publish. Even within this period, they tell us, they have excluded most of her musings on her family, as well as lists of many of the guests she entertained so frenetically. On the other hand, the book is plumped out by ...”

“... and all the more so after the loss of one of our Conservative members, the political scientist Michael Pinto-Duschinsky (who managed with admirable agility to jump in mid-air, having been pushed off the ledge by his own side). Even so, we all knew that our views ranged so far across the political spectrum that the chances of meaningful consensus were not ...”

“... in the first, formative years after the Bolshevik Revolution, when almost all the capitalist powers sent military forces to support the Bolsheviks’ opponents in the Civil War, most of the resident foreigners, with the exception of Comintern personnel, were indeed quasi-spies reporting to some foreign intelligence agency, even those with good contacts ...”

“... American future and of a positive programme of ideas increases popular faith in the wonder-working powers of the great man,’ wrote Hofstadter. ‘No personality has ever expressed the American popular temper so articulately’ and his ‘passing left American liberalism demoralised and all but ...”

“... exactly a shift of allegiance, a passage from one stream to the other – the father’s magnetic powers are too strong for that. But Mehta is forced to accept what he finds a ‘chilling’ interpretation of the man he has so much loved and admired and imitated. Amolak Ram Mehta had not, as his son had always fondly imagined, ‘been born without the ...”

“... the Foreign Office or anybody else, testified at least to his patience as a negotiator and to his powers of endurance. I recall a monthly Arts Council meeting which was being conducted by the Vice-Chairman, on the assumption that Goodman, on his weary way back from Salisbury, would have to miss it; but after a few minutes he arrived, direct from the ...”

“... rather than anything exceptional, anything that might explain his greatness as an artist, his powers of sympathy and imagination. On the other hand, the portraits presented here of Titian’s friend and public-relations manager, Pietro Aretino, and his greatest patron, King Philip of Spain, are rich in revealing detail and seem, by contrast, fully ...”

“... of access to a civilised society. Here, selected almost at random, is a single example of his powers, taken from Education and the University (1943). He is discussing these lines from Lady Macbeth’s welcome to Duncan:                              All our service In every point twice done, and then done double Were poor and ...”

“... will fall between the dead and those who swear they will remember them. Auden wrote once of powers that direct us. He meant blind chance, but the poem also works for powers who wear suits and mount platforms: It is their tomorrow hangs over the earth of the living And all that we wish for our friends; but existence ...”

“... people than William Cobbett was adamant that Asiatic cholera itself was a fiction invented by the powers-that-be to hold the masses in terror. Indeed, as Steve Watkins underlines in his book, the Left in many of its moods has traditionally suspected that the medical profession is merely the Tory Party in a white coat. Yet even it such diatribes make good ...”

“... in a rage, Christina could be a ripper and a smasher. The elder sister, Maria, and loyal William Michael were the ‘calms’. On ‘My heart is like a singing bird’ William’s editorial comment was: ‘I have more than once been asked whether I could account for the outburst of exuberant joy evidenced in this celebrated lyric; I am unable to do ...”