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“... and the self-mocking undertone of many of the most brilliant metaphors make Barnes more like Alan Bennett than he is like Martin Amis or Ian McEwan. Indeed, on page 71 of England, England the following serio-ludicro simile suddenly unfurls: It’s like looking for the tag to unwrap a CD. You know that feeling? There’s a coloured strip running all the ...”

“... voyage and uttering Enlightenment cries in Romantic language. ‘Oh, bliss, to be young in the light of morning over the sea! To awaken refreshed, young and strong, every sense on the alert! Malte Moritz! My name, hovering like a kite in liberty’s breezes. Malte Moritz von Putbus. To my friends, though, I am often “Mignon”.’ He is sailing to the ...”

“... operating). As Leslie Stephen, first editor, once said, much of the value of the DNB lies in the light it sheds on the lives of the second-rate, meaning second-rank, about whom it is not easy to find information elsewhere. If we do not need it for Lord Blake’s long piece on Harold Macmillan, we certainly need it for the life of a lesser prime ...”

“... wrote in the Independent that the Labour Party has moved ‘to the left faster than the speed of light’. The definition of ‘left’ here is one that few outside Blairite circles would recognise, but it’s still telling. The idea that Labour has fled to the ‘left’, though absurd by any conventional definition, and the belief in the party’s general ...”

“... it as one of the few contemporary novels he liked. The book was reviewed in the New York Times by Alan Friedman, the author of a forgotten novel called Hermaphrodeity, who described it as ‘a nearly inscrutable mystery’ powered by ‘camp, vamp and very damp wit’. He praised White’s ‘poetic brilliance’ and ‘hard, gem-like style’ but ...”

“... at all. ‘I carry ideas for films around in my head, but I’d never share them and show them the light of day, not until they were completed.’ He had effectively said nothing, and in the process said everything. Loach wasn’t being stubborn, though stubbornness makes some of his best films better (and some of his worst more unwieldy). The fundamental ...”

“... written with Clarke’s usual panache. The Russian chapters are fascinating – if only for the light they throw on Stalin’s Soviet Union and the futility of the notion that Left understands Left. The problem lies in the weight given to them. Can it be justified by the novelty of the sources and the fact that other historians have tended to neglect ...”

“... is preserved as attractive, safe and comfortable, and dependable, with lots of greenery, lots of light, and entertainment. These things work. They work because a mall has a small management that controls the environment – one mall manager who understands that people come here to be comfortable. Our mission is to do downtown what has been done in the ...”

“... Then he fell back upon the rhetorical generalities for which he was well known.’ In the words of Alan Clark: ‘For a few seconds Kinnock had her cornered, and you could see fear in those blue eyes. But then he had an attack of wind, gave her time to recover.’ Moore also quotes Tony Blair, who was sitting in the chamber as a young MP, taking note: ‘It ...”

“... It is the power to invest and enter into a relationship or situation in one’s own way, in the light of one’s prior experience. It is the power to be open to new experience in a way that not only allows the old to affect the new but also allows the new to affect the old. In this account transference is not only the problem: it is also the point. Anyone ...”

“... often passed Peter’s flat in Graham Road in Hackney late at night and he would see his workroom light still blazing. He wrote for virtually every copy of Art Monthly in its first few years and not just articles and reviews – he even wrote long epistles for the letters page. He was also writing for New Society and other publications. And then there were ...”

“... staged by the Alliance was far more important, since it had the effect of shedding a merciless light on Labour’s weakest point, and was all the more difficult to deal with because it was taking place within another party. Young is not at his best with opinion polls and electoral data. Examining the 1987 result, for example, he speaks of the rise in the ...”

“... attacked ‘the sort of eunuch type with a vegetarian smell, who go about spreading sweetness and light … readers of Edward Carpenter or some other pious sodomite’. Carpenter met Whitman in person when he travelled to America in 1877. This first meeting with the poet and the 19-year-old farm-boy who was his companion inspired Carpenter not only in his ...”

“... One is John von Neumann, whose team built the first electronic digital computer. The other was Alan Turing, who pioneered the logical theory of computation. It would be quite wrong to characterise the one man as applied, the other as pure. Turing was fascinated by all sorts of mechanical and electrical computational devices, while von Neumann was a ...”

“... quite elaborate commentaries on paintings (looking at the reproduction of A Sergeant of the Light Horse, I wouldn’t agree, though, with either part of his verdict that it is ‘a masterpiece of camp’) – he is expressive, too, when interpreting family photographs. His ability to make musical commentary and judgment appears less. In the second part ...”