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“... only such acts in matters of state as are provided for in this constitution and he shall not have powers related to government’. In practice, this amounts to a far stricter constraint on political utterance than that imposed on other constitutional monarchies. Akihito faithfully avoided straying across this line. Instead, he communicated by a kind of ...”

“... Mackenzie are in the foreground, far more important to him than the club-like asseverations of Richard Benson and the other Southern bores with whom he has to endure his summer holidays. The mysteries of fishing – which are not only mysteries but skills – come better from Alec than they do from such prim experts as Bobby Paton (‘Fishing with the fly ...”

“... their opponents in the propaganda war by a brilliant campaign of softening up the press. Richard Evans of the Times was quoted as saying of their Press Officer, Pat Edlin: ‘He was the best Press Officer I’ve ever come across. He made press men in Whitehall or the big companies look like beginners. He ought to give lessons in it.’ Shrewder and ...”

“... an attempt to convince the Russians that all issues of policy between the two super-powers were interconnected. There was at the same time the exciting and eventually rewarding adventure of re-opening United States relations with the People’s Republic of China. There was the fidgety fence-mending to be done inside the Nato alliance with West ...”

“... in Bohemia, importing an opera company from Vienna and building up a horn ensemble of legendary powers. Bohemian players became so skilful that they travelled to France, not to learn, but to play. German makers were known all over Europe for their skill and inventiveness. Indeed, it seems likely that the first crooked horns – instruments capable of ...”

“... of an interrogation about the lost letters, had incriminated himself to the solicitor-general, Richard Rich. Urged by Rich to accept the new law, More had allegedly replied: ‘Your conscience will save you, and my conscience will save me.’ Rich had then, it seems, played the classic stool pigeon’s trick of disclaiming any authority to embark on the ...”

“... such negativity had all but drained away. ‘A new generation of Dadaists has emerged today,’ Richard Hamilton wrote in 1961, ‘but son of Dada is accepted.’ With Jeff Koons, the current maestro of the readymade, whose work is the subject of a retrospective at the Whitney in New York (until 19 October), acceptance has become affirmation, even ...”

“... full of junk and old gadgetry floating through time, dead appliances that still hinted at their powers of improvement. I felt she was keeping them for a happier domestic life in the next world, or for the past to return in this one, shaking us out of our need for better radios.She called one day to ask me to stop sending nice pictures of my holidays to her ...”

“... is perhaps what makes James, in his late Prefaces, refer to the novelist as ‘the Poet’. For Richard Poirier in A World Elsewhere, James’s concern with form marks his concentration on the mind; Edith Wharton’s ‘satisfaction with the simple and sequential ordering of events’ in the chronicle-novel reflects her sense that experience is determined ...”

“... she’s reading – she will find appealing. They split up when he tries to tell her about his powers, not because she believes him but because she finds it a repellent line of thought in itself – a creep’s fantasy. She has a point. Nicholson Baker has put his usual prodigies of inventiveness into evoking the sensations, both brash and subtle, made ...”

“... and the crumbling of services on a scale that would have gladdened the ruralist heart of a Richard Jefferies. Five years ago, Roy Porter still diagnosed ‘a downward spiral of infrastructural and human problems that will prove hard to halt’. Yet now, when London has slipped way down the table of city-sizes and tours round the eerie magnificence of ...”

“... jacket and white foustanella, hand on hip, legs apart, a scimitar at his side. This is Major Richard Church of the British-funded 1st Regiment Greek Light Infantry, as painted in 1813 by Denis Dighton. At the time, he was commanding Greek soldiers he had recruited to fight against Napoleon. He subsequently left the British army and, after a stint as the ...”

“... whose language changed so that they no longer spoke of themselves as responsible to non-human powers would thereby have invented a new kind of human being. The difficulty faced by a philosopher who, like myself, is sympathetic to this suggestion, one who thinks of himself as auxiliary to the poet rather than to the physicist, is to avoid hinting that this ...”

“... that his daughter Sara had followed him into hypochondria and drug addiction. As Rosemary Ashton, Richard Holmes and Morton Paley remind us, Coleridge did survive the long years of estrangement, both from Wordsworth and from all he had ceded to Wordsworth; he did begin to return to himself. When the current of critical opinion reversed, he found himself the ...”

“... It was Richard Crossman who described secrecy as ‘the British disease’. As with other alleged vices anglais – strikes, spanking and sodomy spring to mind – this seems on the surface to be unfair. Other societies have undoubtedly been as secretive. Soviet Russia, for example: I don’t suppose it was any easier to see your medical records there than it is here ...”