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“... Banned in Cheltenham’. But it was an expensive production at a shilling an issue, and short-lived. It would never have attracted such national attention (other papers also covered its launch, though with less of a sense of imminent danger than the Mail) if the leading spirit among the rebels had not been Esmond Romilly, the nephew by marriage ...”

“... When John le Carré published A Perfect Spy in 1986, Philip Roth, then spending a lot of time in London, called it ‘the best English novel since the war’. Not being such a fan of A Perfect Spy, I’ve occasionally wondered what Roth’s generous blurb says about the postwar English novel. As a le Carré bore, however, I’ve also wondered how Roth managed to overlook Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (1974), the central novel in le Carré’s career, in which George Smiley – an outwardly diffident ex-spook with a strenuously unfaithful wife and an interest in 17th-century German literature – comes out of retirement to identify the turncoat in a secret service that’s explicitly presented as a metaphorical ‘vision of the British establishment at play ...”

“... He insists, and he has the right to insist, that he is as authentic a voice of modern Britain as Philip Larkin is. As some pages of Poetry and Metamorphosis make clear, the Britain that Tomlinson speaks for is one that most of us, gratefully or not, are ready to think defunct: the Britain of Ford Madox Ford in 1913-15, which was host to Wyndham Lewis’s ...”

“... written word cannot compete with the zoom lens. Sporting events are, for the most part, simply too short, so that much of the writing is concerned with what happens ‘off the field’. Even cricket, which used to attract good writing, seems now to evoke so different an atmosphere that I doubt if it is worth reading about: but I may be wrong. There are, of ...”

“... In June​ , Philip Hammond, in his last few weeks as chancellor of the Exchequer, wrote to the candidates vying to succeed Theresa May as leader of the Conservative Party and asked them to pledge that, if elected, they would retain his target of bringing down national debt as a percentage of GDP. ‘If we do not commit to getting our debt down after a nine-year run of uninterrupted economic growth,’ he demanded, ‘how can we demonstrate a dividing line between the fiscal responsibility of our party and the reckless promises of John McDonnell and Jeremy Corbyn?’ Four years ago in these pages I warned that the government’s plans to bring down the headline debt figure through asset sales, including the sale of part of the student loan book, would mean a loss of millions of pounds to the Treasury (LRB, 5 March 2015 ...”

“... is an opinion of Belloc’s vouched for, it seems, by two of his grandsons, Julian Jebb and Dom Philip Jebb OSB. Nothing about Belloc can be stranger to us today than the depth of his anti-semitism. He was a man who delighted in his own extravagances and inconsistencies, but there was commonly a hint of burlesque in his parading them, and that he was found ...”

“... it, an engraved card that read JULIAN MORROW. I stood there for a moment and then I knocked, three short raps. A minute or so passed, and another, and then the white door opened just a crack. A face looked out at me. Thus the narrator becomes the reader, and we share an ecstasy of wide-eyedness. Repeatedly, the novel returns to this function: as I was climbing ...”

“... works by Michelangelo, Col-eridge, Hogg, Stevenson, Kafka, Jean Rhys and numerous others. It is a short book, but dense. Warner’s highly complex line of argument, winding around so much material, and so tightly, produces a compacted, even crabbed architecture. You feel like you’ve stepped inside a miniaturised cathedral. The movement of the first chapter ...”

“... Compared to boring old Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe, we think, had a short life and a gay one. When not writing his sonorous verse, he was spying, preaching atheism, fighting and getting murdered. Park Honan has done one of the two already, and now has done the other. Coming shortly after David Riggs’s solid, even too-solid The World of Christopher Marlowe, his Christopher Marlowe: Poet and Spy feels a little lightweight ...”

“... with presenting an external, perhaps critical, perspective. Nevertheless, in The Lives to Come, Philip Kitcher provides an outstanding illustration of what the philosophy of science can contribute to public understanding. Molecular genetics, the topic of Kitcher’s book, is surely the area of contemporary research with the greatest potential relevance to ...”

“... title sounds like a novel, and the book can and should be read like one – a very remarkable one. Philip Larkin, who had the knack of making sideways critical comments as memorable as those in his verse, remarked that ‘the first thing a novelist must provide is a separate world,’ and it is true that the world Dr Green has made out of the relationship of ...”

“... palatable to the middle classes’. The novella’s effect was all the stronger for not being – Philip Kitcher misreads it – about ‘a closet homosexual’ who has ‘refused to acknowledge his sexual inclinations’. Unlike his fully self-aware creator, who, though never a practising homosexual (‘how can one sleep with men?’ he asked in a 1950 diary ...”

“... intellectual centre; and the final disruption and takeover of the Persian empire (335-23) by the short-lived and ambiguously Hellenic world conqueror Alexander III of Macedon. These extraordinary events – and the Greek writers who, propagandists all, preserved them for posterity – dictated, in definitive and compelling fashion, the triumph, over two ...”

“... group which operated out of the mountains in Tajikistan and northern districts of Afghanistan, was short-lived. There were a number of incursions into Kyrgyzstan in 1999 and 2000, but several hundred of its members were killed fighting alongside the Taliban in Afghanistan after 9/11. While the Taliban were able to relaunch their movement a few years later, the ...”

“... Bevan as a monumental study of ‘the man and his socialism’. It is repeatedly contrasted with Philip Williams’s biography of Gaitskell, always in order to say how much better Foot’s book is – it being understood that Foot was a Bevanite, Williams a Gaitskellite. Once in full flow Morgan writes in the same windy, cadenced way as Foot: ‘Foot’s ...”