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“... Nick Jenkins and Waugh’s Guy Crouchback onwards, we get passive, defeated characters, if not Adrian Mole-like wimps. It can, however, be argued that the Victorian novels singled out for Leavis’s great tradition were not entirely dissimilar – Dorothea Brooke is ground down by life, and the Jamesian personality has Mole-like tendencies. What Taylor is ...”

“... effect, only two theories of evolution have ever been put forward,’ writes John Maynard Smith, ‘one, originating with Lamarck ... the other originating with Darwin.’ Such reduction of the scientific corpus to patterns of mutual exclusivity doubtless tells us something about the strategy, if not the logic, of scientific corroboration. It is a ...”

“... familiar truths of national character. The dictionary had been undertaken by the publisher George Smith as a piece of private enterprise, with no official or institutional backing, and it had been brought to completion in record time by a very small staff. Less fortunate nations, in whom the spirit of liberty and energy of ‘character’ had been suppressed ...”

“... a great public event, or war or revolution,’ she said in her acceptance speech for the 1961 W.H. Smith Prize for Friday’s Footprint, the writer’s ‘view is as private as when he writes of an incestuous love affair’. This is the realm of inner ‘commitment’ which struggles on the page with ‘relevance’, the writer’s unavoidable political ...”

“... which, again, is easier to do if you don’t know them. Edward Pygge could write about Adrian Mitchell’s Semen for Vietnam Appeal in the Review, but when you met Adrian Mitchell, he was a perfectly nice chap and all that. Not that I knew him very well or know him now. I can well imagine that if I did it would ...”