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“... then of the poets Langston Hughes and Sterling Brown, and next a line of novelists headed by Richard Wright, began the task of reclamation about two generations earlier than the Caribbean writers who identified – if one can nowadays put it that way – with Europe, specifically England. Their literary industry, centred largely in London, only really ...”

“... European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg delivered its first judgment on 1 July 1961. Gerard Richard Lawless had been arrested four years earlier while attempting to travel from Ireland to Great Britain. Under a 1940 amendment to the Irish Offences against the State Act (1939), a government minister could order the detention without trial of ‘any ...”

“... Shirley Hazzard​ liked to tell the story of how she got to know Graham Greene. A rainy morning in the late 1960s, a café on the island of Capri. She was doing the Times crossword. Greene and his friend Michael Richey came in from Mass at the church across the square and she overheard them at a nearby table fumbling for a line of Robert Browning’s ‘The Lost Mistress’:Tomorrow we meet the same then, dearest?May I take your hand in mine?Mere friends are we – well, friends the merestKeep much that I resign …Yet I will but say what mere friends say,Or only a thought stronger;I will hold your hand but as long as all may –And then, according to Hazzard, Greenecould not remember the very end ...”

“... The Darwin scholar, John Greene, once summarised the Darwinian revolution as the triumph of a dynamic and non-teleological structuring of nature over static, teological systems: the triumph of chance and change over design and permanence, the triumph of objectivity in the life sciences, of secularism and naturalism over clericalism and the supernatural ...”

“... band of six men – Peter Cook, Warren Chalk, Ron Herron, Dennis Crompton, Michael Webb and David Greene – whose day jobs were with big commercial practices and local authorities. They formed in the early 1960s and over the next decade or so produced thousands of designs for ‘cities of the future’ that were highly original, sometimes on the ...”

“... in Los Angeles, where he wrote a thesis titled ‘Myth and Symbol in the Literature of Graham Greene’.Nguyen’s narrator is designed to have several dual identities, but it’s his bond with Man and Bon that turns out to be the engine of both novels, as he tries to carry out Man’s orders, handed down from the Viet Cong, while protecting Bon from ...”

“... The other, less flattering image comes from the gathering in the Queen’s Gallery to hear Richard von Weisaecker make an address. The President of West Germany, speaking a crystalline, virtually unaccented English, spoke for about half an hour with restraint, wisdom and the quiet earnest of a man gravely engaged upon serious things. He had been ...”

“... that in his youth he had been attracted by the existential dilemmas treated in the fiction of Greene, Mauriac and other Catholic writers, but that in his own novels ‘I domesticated their themes to the humdrum suburban-parochial milieu that I knew best.’ This was certainly true of his fiction up to that date: the baked dusty roads of Mexico or the ...”

“... Claud was sent to school at Berkhamstead. The headmaster during the First World War was Charles Greene, father of Graham and a high-minded radical, and Cockburn first saw political violence on Armistice Day, when a drunken mob burst into the school accusing Greene (quite wrongly) of having been ‘anti-war’. But the ...”

“... regime largely protected from inquiring eyes by its inaccessibility and its secret police. Graham Greene’s The Honorary Consul, published in 1973, was set among the exiles in Corrientes, across the Argentine frontier, but it caught very well the claustrophobic atmosphere of 20th-century Paraguay. The country’s greatest novelist, Augusto Roa Bastos, long ...”

“... take it seriously. We find Kingsley on the golf-course, discussing the problem with his colleague, Richard Short, while they wait for ‘the brisk, serious teenagers’ of Edinburgh to finish with the hole before them. Short says: ‘You’re on a real winner. Even if it is a total red herring, spontaneously resolving cancer is big news. The press will be on ...”

“... produce a ‘more or less continuous autobiographical narrative’ which, we are told, the editor Richard Pennington further abbreviated for publication. The first four years of this diary are dissolved into Mr Pennington’s Introduction, and Peterley Harvest, ‘the private diary of David Peterley now for the first time printed’, opened in June 1930 as ...”

“... Richard Rogers’s new Lloyd’s building in London has begun business, to predictable complaints. A Guardian journalist asking for off-the-cuff comments from underwriters found them grumpy – the only appreciative voice was foreign and female. That is not surprising: the new Lloyd’s is an architectural statement of un-English vehemence ...”

“... rebellion. ‘The play,’ he averred, ‘was of King Harry the 4th, and of the killing of King Richard II.’ Third, on 18 February, one of the players, Augustine Phillips, in signed testimony given under oath, described the play as ‘the play of the deposing and killing of King Richard II’. Fourth, at Meyrick’s ...”

“... excluded from the New Deal and Fair Deal. White anger later found a grim and calculating ally in Richard Nixon, with his ‘Southern strategy’, his appeals to the ‘silent majority’ and his calls for ‘law and order’ in America’s cities.Yet no American president has so flagrantly pandered to white grievance as Donald Trump, even as he has praised ...”