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“... the reason novelists and short-story writers are often quite distinct breeds). The American writer David Means will have none of this. His highly original stories are coats that have been reversed to show their linings. Rather than lightly hint at an exquisite pattern or organising symbol, he likes to accentuate the pattern, to dash it in the reader’s ...”

“... transition period. They were belatedly tabled at the summit convened by Bill Clinton at Camp David in July 2000, but Jerusalem was the issue that ultimately led to the failure of the summit and the breakdown of the Oslo peace process. Religious rivalries are notoriously difficult to resolve, and Jerusalem’s spiritual significance for the three great ...”

“... got properly started before it begins to show signs of not going on for ever. So when I read in David Plante’s Difficult Women (1979) that Sonia Orwell in her final years complained to him, ‘I’ve fucked up my life. I’m angry because I’ve fucked up my life,’ it doesn’t seem to me necessarily to imply a particularly tragic or wasted life. At ...”

“... economic benefits to the cash-strapped council, but these depend on something harder to describe. David Harvey calls it ‘collective symbolic capital’, the ‘special marks of distinction that attach to some place, which have a significant drawing power on the flows of capital more generally’. Edinburgh’s USP is a combination of historical fiction and ...”

“... building; the Taliban hadn’t had the funds to build any new schools in the two years they had held power in Kandahar. Women would be allowed to work outside the home once the war was over. Stoning was the punishment for adultery, with the man put into a sack and the woman, in her burqa, placed in a pit up to her waist before the crowd pitched in. It was ...”

“... in what turned out to be his final years he backed away from almost every position he had formerly held, even rewriting his early and most difficult ‘elitist’ compositions to make them more accessible to the ‘masses’. Born in 1936 to a radical, bohemian and impoverished middle-class family in Cornwall, where art and music flourished, Cardew had a ...”

“... rather than La Realidad, misled by assurances that I would find the local leader, Comandante David; I was stranded where not much was happening for the third anniversary of the uprising. But was I the only one who was not ‘in Reality’? After all, the Zapatista movement likes to appear as something of a phantom, expressing itself in concealments and ...”

“... This, more or less, is how Present Times begins, and one thing very quickly becomes clear: David Storey likes compound ...”

“... invoked racist stereotypes to point the finger at Conley; the African American press which held out for Conley’s innocence was, in turn, not immune to anti-semitism. The reaction against this internecine warfare, however, helped to promote a black-Jewish civil rights alliance that endured for decades. Forgetting its origins in the case that set black ...”

“... eel-like name), who was ‘large, foreign, frightening and ravenous’, according to the historian David Hanlon. Nahn Samwohl was the evil version of the smaller, friendlier-looking freshwater eels worshipped by Pohnpeians. He lived on one of the islands of Nan Madol in a well, connected to other islands by underwater tunnels. Twice a year, in a ceremony ...”

“... salmonella’). Then there is the long line of sex-scandal casualties: Cecil Parkinson, Tim Yeo, David Mellor (greatly exaggerated, but not his only alleged misdemeanour), Hartley Booth, Michael Brown (though he is a borderline case, since he resigned from office while denying allegations that he had had a homosexual relationship). We should also not forget ...”

“... As a colleague of David Simpson at the University of California and a friend graciously thanked in his acknowledgments, can I pretend to have the disinterestedness necessary to write an objective review of his book? Or, as a reviewer opening with a confession of this sort – what in the lingo of our day is called a ‘full disclosure’ – have I then somehow neutralised my personal stake in such a way that I can offer my opinion as unbiased? Can such reflexivity work to undo the debilitating effects of situatedness? These are the kinds of question that agonise Simpson, who has written Situatedness in the hope of stemming the tide of what he calls, following Andrew Sullivan, ‘azza’ declarations – ‘as a colleague of David Simpson’; ‘as a white, middle-class male’ – in the age of identity politics ...”

“... patient is Jung’s, a disturbed woman not at all underplayed by Keira Knightley. The movie – David Cronenberg’s A Dangerous Method, with a screenplay by Christopher Hampton – opens with a view of her struggling against her captors in a horse-drawn coach (the date is 1904) and being delivered to a posh sanatorium in Switzerland. She goes rigid when ...”

“... the issue planned by Harich and Bloch. At the Central Committee’s bidding, Leipzig University held in April 1957 a two-day conference on Bloch’s philosophy. Predictably its conclusions coincided with Kurt Hager’s. Compulsorily retired at the end of the 1955-6 year, Bloch was now isolated from student life, though by no means disgraced. He retained a ...”

“... idea of flourishing’ which consists of ‘a deep respect for qualitative difference’. This is held to be true of Hard Times in particular, but also of novels in general, which are ‘democratic, compassionate, committed to complexity, choice and qualitative difference’. It is a warmer line to take than the current orthodoxy in literary theory, which ...”