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“... beards and whiskers with sad, rheumy eyes – Matthew Arnold, Carlyle, Swinburne, William Morris, Leslie Stephen, Tennyson – giving off a steamy despair. They had heard the melancholy long withdrawing roar of faith, and they did not like the sound of it. Today relegated to a wall in a side room, these literary men seem to take second billing to the wall ...”

“... the boredom of its conveyance. And the moment the story enters, the boredom comes upon you.’ Leslie Fiedler found another kind of boredom in Pilgrimage, one he defended, grudgingly, as ‘a warranty of its commitment to truth and the dull reality we all inhabit’. The notion of a ‘commitment to truth’ is acceptable enough, but the novel’s admirers ...”

“... wrote in the 1972 edition of Parliamentary Socialism, channelling disillusionment with Harold Wilson, who appeared to have betrayed his left-wing promise. Miliband thought the left within the party would always struggle to influence a moderate leadership; it seemed impossible to him, as it did to everyone until it actually happened, that someone as ...”

“... emigration to America, and his sense of himself as a writer. Not the kind, as he says of Angus Wilson, who ‘proudly calls your attention to every single God-damned nuance’, but a ‘“reassuring” type of writer’ who ‘takes you by the hand and leads you step by step from a familiar into an unfamiliar situation’. Isherwood knew from his own ...”

“... field’s core concepts (realism, liberal internationalism) back to Thucydides or Machiavelli or Wilson is, Vitalis insists, a post-1945 invention. Instead, at the moment of its American birth, ‘international relations meant race relations.’ Races, not states or nations, were considered humanity’s foundational political units; ‘race war’ – not ...”

“... reported that an animal which may have been Gef had been dramatically captured and killed. Mr Leslie Graham, a retired army lieutenant who bought the farmhouse after Margaret Irving sold up, was putting away his motorcycle one night when he was startled by an animal with gleaming eyes. It had a weasel-like appearance but it was bigger than a weasel, more ...”

“... centre Russell instead of Charles. The cult’s celebrity patron is called Mitch instead of Dennis Wilson, and the group lives rent-free on a ranch where they help raise llamas instead of renting out horses, as the Manson family did at Spahn Ranch. Cline also removes all reference to Helter Skelter – Manson’s delusional plan to incite a race war in ...”

“... before becoming a foreign service officer in Rusk’s department, he compared Rusk to Woodrow Wilson in a term paper. Wilson ‘had a beautiful dream’ of global freedom and peace on the American model, Holbrooke wrote, and ‘it shone in the skies for all the world to see and – for a while – believe.’Holbrooke ...”

“... remind him of a bet they’d struck on the outcome: ‘Oppie, you owe me ten dollars.’ General Leslie Groves, the overall Director of the Manhattan Project, immediately appreciated the military significance of what he’d just seen: ‘The bang must certainly have been a pretty big one . . . The war’s over.’ For the most part, if the scientists and ...”

“... needed shock treatment, cannily and even mischievously arranged for it to come in the form of Leslie Hore-Belisha, patron saint of road safety. This unlikeliest of all holders of the office was, Danchev writes, ‘outré, perfervid and Jewish; a celibate sensualist, a congenital iconoclast and a National Liberal. He dined off black plates and dreamed of ...”

“... Alfred Kazin, Lionel Trilling, Delmore Schwartz, Allen Tate, Kenneth Burke, Robert Fitzgerald, Leslie Fiedler and John Crowe Ransom – this last its founder as a school of literary criticism ‘to teach those who teach it’. Marianne Moore, in Brooklyn, had a quieter time, but was just as much in touch with them all through friends and books. All the ...”

“... deal. BP denied any involvement, and the story soon fell apart. Then, in 2007, Leslie Abrahams, a former employee, told the Mail on Sunday that BP had worked with MI6 in the early 1990s to help bring about a more pro-Western, pro-business regime in Baku. Abrahams claimed that in the course of just four months the company had spent more than ...”

“... have to be taken that in more normal times would be considered reckless in the extreme,’ General Leslie Groves, the director of the Manhattan Project, later wrote. Solving the waste problem was regarded as a bothersome, secondary chore, something to be put off in favour of more exciting and prestigious endeavours. Carroll ...”

“... or wasn’t only, a pulp craftsman embittered by the faint praise he’d been lobbed by Edmund Wilson before the likes of Eliot and Auden announced themselves as fans. Slick magazine writers were no good either – ‘their scenes are almost tiresomely neat … but they are little men who have forgotten how to pray’ – and when discussing the right way ...”

“... for reasons which I wholly understand, this experience was not vouchsafed to Mr Gaitskell, Mr Wilson, Mr Brown, Mr Jay and the other leading members of the Labour front bench.’ This probably made little impact on Gaitskell and Co, but for Macmillan’s generation the fact that the entire Labour front bench had avoided active service was something to be ...”