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“... Island. William Styron is almost as monstrous as Hellman herself: self-centred, nervy, and savage with contempt for anyone who gets in his way. When he accidentally burns the fancy pan-fried quail he is preparing for Hellman and her friends in Hellman’s kitchen one night, he blames the resulting mess on Mahoney and her fellow cook, who have been ...”

“... and that ‘the crazed parataxis still flashes the voltage of the street.’ We are told that Robert Southey’s ‘over-long nose’ gave his face a ‘workmanlike quality, and his work ethic is what he is largely remembered for’. And this, of a representation of melancholy: ‘He wears only linens over his loins. If they are soiled, we don’t ...”

“... using the war? ‘But it was war,’ he said despairingly. ‘Greece, Yugoslavia, Russia – savage war. But Pearl Harbor too – Hiroshima – and later, what about Vietnam, and now the West Bank, where they are breaking people’s bones? In all these places the innocent died and die, women and children by the hundreds of thousands: who spoke for ...”

“... largely ended with Beckett – of crepuscular states, of alienation and leaping surrealism, and of savage fictionality. He took from Dostoevsky the idea that plot is not something that merely happens to a character, but that a really strange character leads plot around like an obedient dog. He took from Strindberg the idea that the soul is not a continuous ...”

“... was first identified, a group of writers that included Amis, Larkin, Wain, Donald Davie, Robert Conquest and others. As J.D. Scott put it in the baptismal piece in the Spectator, ‘The Movement, as well as being anti-phoney, is anti-wet; sceptical, robust, ironic, prepared to be as comfortable as possible.’ Amis in particular had, as a later ...”

“... mood was infectious among the personnel in charge of exterminating the brutes. The Atlantic’s Robert Kaplan cheerfully reported that ‘Welcome to Injun Country’ was the refrain among American soldiers worldwide. The primal blood-lusts of the war on terror survived Obama’s renaming of it. The Seal Team that in 2011 eventually scalped Osama bin Laden ...”

“... the English as ‘barbarians’ whose cowardly and perfidious behaviour had shocked even savage but honourable Indians. Soon, the Anglophile literature of the Philosophes was being pushed off the booksellers’ shelves by such robustly patriotic novels as Robert-Martin Lesuire’s Les Sauvages de l’Europe ...”

“... himself into ever shallower entries, perhaps to evade his admirers. I have just been reading Robert Byron’s The Road to Oxiana, recently reissued with a nice introduction by Bruce Chatwin.† Byron’s splendid book is made rather than marred by his unrepentant snobbery. Chatwin, who travelled the same road thirty years after Byron, in 1962, looks back ...”

“... NoViolet Bulawayo​ intended to write a non-fiction account of the 2017 coup that deposed Robert Mugabe and made Emmerson Mnangagwa, his one-time deputy, the third president of Zimbabwe. But she couldn’t keep up with the changing political situation. There was a sense of bitterness: the coup wasn’t the new beginning many had hoped for ...”

“... such comments are revealing of how he was perceived: he was “monstrous”, “barbarous”, “a savage”. This was exactly the language used by many travel writers at the time to characterise … people of African origins – such as Barber.’ A detail from the Tate’s copy of ‘A Young Black’, painted in the manner of Reynolds, date ...”

“... Edward Coke’s Institutes how well so ever he could plead.’ The royalist historian-physician Robert Brady remarks sourly that Coke ‘hath a fine fetch to play off the Great Charter and interpret it by his Modern-Law, that was not then known or heard of’. Such scepticism​ still appeals to our own knowing cast of mind. All the same, a closer ...”

“... was an object of suspicion. Over the following years, as he repositioned himself more securely in Robert Walpole’s England, he and Burlington, ‘the architect Earl’, with the gardener William Kent formed the heart of a coterie that made landscape design into an art form with rules, conventions and, for those with eyes to see, quite distinct ...”

“... The struggle was always a solitary one: the fate of one man against nature, one hunter against savage forces, with no God to help him. Hemingway founded a style in the space left for heroism. Indeed, that is the way his style works: by never actually mentioning the main anxiety. Writing to his siblings from his desk at the Kansas City Star on 5 November ...”

“... script realised in film, the skiing drama Downhill Racer, directed by Michael Ritchie and starring Robert Redford. Solo Faces is the story of a rock-climbing drifter and his friend and rival and their pursuit of glory through heroic feats on the mountain. In the earlier A Sport and a Pastime, the quarry, the struggled for peak, is perfect sexual love, though ...”

“... that Parshley had cut at least 10 per cent of the original text, and showed that the most savage cuts affected Beauvoir’s account of exceptional women in history. She also demonstrated that Parshley had made a hash of Beauvoir’s philosophical vocabulary. After reading Simons’s essay, Beauvoir replied: ‘I was dismayed to learn the extent to ...”