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“... had shaken off the dust of Oak Park, Illinois, he was at least in a position to say hullo to John Updike in the office corridor. He had put enough mileage between himself and his origins to achieve urbanity. Yet it takes only a brief comparison between Keillor’s Lake Wobegon stories and Updike’s Rabbit novels (or, even more to the point, Updike’s ...”

“... the Ottoman-controlled Aegean. In the years that preceded the founding of Jamestown in Virginia, John Smith had fought Ottoman armies in Eastern Europe and spent time as an Ottoman captive. It’s no surprise, then, that many of the conceptual frameworks that European colonisers applied to the Americas derived from their encounters with Muslims at home: they ...”

“... and so on. Those giveaway words were originally proscribed around 1956 by Nancy Mitford and John Betjeman, perhaps partly as a joke, but now served as infallible class markers: ‘It’s the way people like us don’t talk,’ Mum explains. There are things that must not be said or done, no reason offered or needed, and things that must be done, however ...”

“... banjaxed and blandished by turns, is apt to divine in himself a moral purity his political masters lack. Democracies create a climate of moral narcissism among the politicised classes. The thought then beckons that venality belongs not just to the bully-pulpit, Bolly-spraying Bullingdonians who rule us, but to the system that hoisted them into ...”

“... produced similar collections of the writings of Thomas Paine and his contemporaries in the 1790s, John Thelwall, Robert Owen and the British Utopians, and the responsibility for producing a Chartist canon could not have fallen into better hands. Few scholars can match Claeys’s ability to render 19th-century radicalism and socialism coherent by locating ...”

“... if contested motif of the elderly sybarite – best known from the fiction of Philip Roth and John Updike – whose declining sexual picaresque is set against historical or social forces which leave the ageing roué flummoxed and rueful. The Escape, or rather its protagonist, evinces a worldview that is best described as aspirant Rothdike: all raging ...”

“... it suffers from. Much has been written on the same subject; best-known among recent works is John Prebble’s The Highland Clearances. Craig is concerned not so much with the Clearances in themselves as with the sort of memories of them that have lingered among later generations. He is from Aberdeen, and has no Gaelic beyond what he picks up by the ...”

“... to just sit behind a desk somewhere and think sad stuff all day long.’ The central character in John Le Carré’s new novel is said to have ‘a whole self-accusing chorus’ within him: ‘He had people inside himself who really drove him mad.’ Not as mad as the people outside himself are trying to drive him, though. This is a book about hearts rather ...”

“... save his Chelsea friends from heroin addiction and himself from taking his chances in West Beirut; John Chadwick, who leaves the City to pay for the running-costs of his wife’s damp and dilapidated house in Italy with dodgy investments and asset sales, in Davy Chadwick; Richard Verey in Slide, after spells in the Foreign Service and on Wall ...”

“... these activities was much admired, although Arnold, in his judicious way, ranks Yeats below such masters of the craft as Ralph Caldecott and Phil May. In the early years there can have seemed little reason why Yeats should not have made a successful career in this kind of journey work, and he energetically produced drawings for visiting-cards, bookplates and ...”

“... its texture, its clichés. Over the years Amis has done a lot of virtuous wincing over clichés. John Fowles is a prominent target: ‘He managed a wan smile’; ‘God, you’re so naive.’ No expensive talk about Descartes, Marivaux, Lemprière and Aristophanes can procure a pardon for that sort of thing. Other reviewers may commend Thomas Harris for ...”

“... the 1930s. No doubt he was moved by the hunger marches, certainly he was stirred by the death of John Cornford, appalled by Fascism, and disturbed by the plight of Jewish scholars, but what remains clear from her account is that Blunt took little serious interest in politics and had very little knowledge of, or exposure to, the unemployed or oppressed – or ...”

“... easy way to complete the forms. The same applies to statistics from Egyptian asylums supplied by John Warnock, the head of the Lunacy Department there from 1895 to 1923. Warnock admitted to a ‘total ignorance of Arabic’, which must have made sensitive diagnosis difficult. He also diagnosed Egyptian nationalism as ‘an infectious mental disorder’ and ...”

“... contact with London than with one another. When the First Continental Congress convened in 1774, John Adams reported that the delegates were ‘strangers’, unfamiliar with each other’s ideas and experiences. What then explains the road to independence? While most accounts of the coming of the Revolution focus on protests in eastern cities against British ...”

“... in a couple of paragraphs and we are told that lack of evidence prevents us from assessing their masters’ treatment of them. This is just not on: Mr Leyser, for example, gives us an illuminating sketch of how lords ritualised their acts of charity to the poor to enhance their own power (though he understands that such acts were more than simply ...”