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“... barbaric and limited repertoire? Discussing phobias, Phillips makes fruitful reference to William James, a man who seems to grow in stature the more one reads him. James found the name ‘agoraphobia’ rather absurd; Phillips defends it neatly: the agora was ‘that ancient place where words and goods and money were ...”

“... James Meek’s last, bestselling novel, The People’s Act of Love, published in 2005 to great critical acclaim, was set in 1919, in ‘that part of Siberia lying between Omsk and Krasnoyarsk’. Anglophone readers who can locate ‘that’ part of Siberia without a good atlas deserve spot prizes ...”

“... it might have been: Ned Sherrin on Caryl Brahms, for example, or Hugh Johnson on his publisher, James Mitchell: ‘The World Atlas of Wines,’ Johnson writes, ‘became the most discussed and most imitated reference book of the Seventies among rival publishers. By the end of the decade it had sold one million ...”

“... A novel is a bicycle, and readers must pedal. The recent film version of David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas gave a vivid demonstration, almost a bullet-point presentation, of how differently narrative works in the two media. The book presents the reader with a number of openings, which break off without explanation. Readers who persevere (and there are many who ...”

“... who said horrible things about the plebeian Joyce, and about the girls who worked at Woolworths; James Kelman acted like a barbarian at the Booker dinner, and so on. Most of these commentators imagine themselves to be writing a form of intellectual history when they are only pouring gossip into fancy goblets at London book parties. They experience apparently ...”

“... entire, and enough editorial apparatus to fill a dozen critical monographs with a glossary and an atlas thrown in. There are appendices geographical, cosmographical, bibliographical and ecclesiographical, not to mention historical outlines, political timelines, a chart explaining decimal currency, and a tabulated taxonomy of the peerage. More to the ...”

“... corner and ‘tune in’ to more rarefied conversation. I saw him do this myself. We were in the Atlas Mountains. My father was 54; I was 19, and clueless. To me, the Moroccans in their peaked jellabas seemed like slightly sinister hobbits. I was alternately gruff and dangerously insouciant, but my father had been here the year before and knew how to treat ...”

“... It wasn’t so much that he flushed out Professor Blunt: smart fellows about Cambridge and St James’s seem to have known all about Blunt for years. It was – first – that Boyle opened out the whole American dimension of the affair, through the FBI/CIA files and the secret chronicles of James Jesus Angleton – that ...”

“... model himself on. He is attracted to writers who have made themselves at home in England: Conrad, James, Pound, above all Eliot, whose protective disguise and horror of ‘spilling mere emotion onto the page’ he emulates. The writers he most admires are all style and no confession, like Ford or Beckett. But his own attempt at aesthetic self-construction ...”

“... imperative of Greenblatt’s opening sentence: ‘Let us imagine that Shakespeare … ’ James Shapiro has no truck with such surmise. Though he too is plagued by the biographer’s hankering to enter the playwright’s mind – ‘to know … what his political views were, whom he loved, how good a father, husband and friend he was, what he did with ...”

“... sense of precision, and his reticence. No one has said that Armstrong was garrulous, but in James Hansen’s biography, First Man, as well as in the film made of the book starring Ryan Gosling and in the recent documentary Armstrong, he comes across as a man of understated wit. Asked to describe what had been a near-death experience, Armstrong merely ...”

“... By the mid-l780s Knight moved in the liberal, not to say liberated Whig circles that had Charles James Fox as a hero, and ancient Athens as an inspiration. Knight’s first literary attempt was to describe a tour of Sicily in 1777. He hired two artists to accompany him, and briefed them to make meticulous drawings of the archaeological sites. His commentary ...”

“... his position in geographical space, he reasoned, required not a single map, but access to a global atlas, one that would allow him to ‘see what London and the adjacent parts are in the kingdom; what the kingdom is in Europe, and what Europe is in the universe’. Much the same, he thought, applied to history. ‘Particular histories represent to you, what ...”

“... instead she complements it with the moral lessons that must, for her, stay close at hand. Thus An Atlas of the Difficult World (1991) shows a landscape romantically observed – ‘What I love here/is old ranches, leaning seaward, lowroofed spreads between rocks … the eucalyptus avenue leading/to the wrecked homestead, the fogwreathed heavy-chested ...”

“... brackish and personal way, elements of the classical tradition (their Economist Building in St James’s was a well-crafted, contextual work for an establishment client), it was all over for Banham – it was a betrayal, after which he went to look elsewhere for his architecture autre. The nearest​ that any of the Brutalist revival volumes published in ...”