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“... Lord Moyne followed Casey as Minister, and in November 1944, in Cairo, was assassinated by the Stern Gang. There is a moving description of the new Lord Moyne’s last harrowing weeks of travel down to Cairo from Damascus, the elaborate funeral procession, and the air journey back to England with his father’s coffin. A few more postings now, to SHAEF in ...”

“... up the anchor. The words ‘BON’ and ‘HOMME’ are clearly legible on the bronze plaque on the stern, but only by tilting your head can you make out the faded ‘RICHARD’ below.I now know a good deal about the Bonhomme Richard. I know that it was originally a French merchant vessel ...”

“... one, we could buy or sell allowances in Los Angeles or San Francisco. If the blueprint in the Stern Review, commissioned by the Treasury, is followed globally – a big if – we will before long be able to trade carbon anywhere in the world. As John Lanchester noted in the last issue of the LRB, the science of global warming is not straightforward. The ...”

“... sais quoi’ with ‘tra-la-la’.Diski’s thoughts are in part a response to an earlier work by Richard Scholar, The Je Ne Sais Quoi in Early Modern Europe, and she’s the first person he talks about on the acknowledgments page of his new book. ‘Her piece brilliantly demonstrated,’ he writes, ‘in a way I could not have imagined, that the ...”

“... fill out her omissions and even to make sense of the overall narrative I read Ronald Hayman, J.P. Stern, Michael Tanner, Rüdiger Bittner, Walter Kaufmann, Leslie Chamberlain and, yes, even Nietzsche on Nietzsche, Ben MacIntyre on Elisabeth’s Paraguayan adventure, and H.F. Peters on Lou Andreas-Salomé (some of the detail below is from these books rather ...”

“... myself seriously as a student. In fact, it seemed to make it somewhat easier for me to write.’ Richard Klein, now the celebrated author of Cigarettes Are Sublime, was one of the guys. Approached by Duke for a quote, he wrote: ‘For decades I have felt guilt and shame for having performed toward her in a way that was unprofessional, exploitative, and lousy ...”

“... of Robert Browning’s Dramatis Personae. The author of Andrea del Sarto would have found in Richard Strauss a subject ideally suited to his imaginative powers. He would have cast the composer, not, I think, in his early years, but towards the end of his life: in 1940, perhaps, in late summer. The scene: Strauss’s tastefully furnished study in his ...”

“... Nietzsche follows up this insight with a fireworks of rhetorics – enter, and eventually exit, Richard Wagner at Bayreuth. Rilke, on the other hand, is compelled to face in his own creative work the paradox inherent in the deliberate making of a modern mythology: he acknowledges the difficulty of inventing consciously what was once the ...”

“... Committee was to be chaired by Tennyson d’Eyncourt, a submarine expert. Its secretary was Albert Stern, a banker in civilian life. By the end of summer there was general agreement that without caterpillar tracks there would be no tank. The Holt proved unsuitable, but – by a great stroke of good luck – Commander Briggs, a Navy man, happened to go into ...”

“... how Shakespeare ‘leads us to the same point’ as the ‘Catholic philosophy of Dante, with its stern judgment of morals’. Chesterton’s influence endured. In Knight’s 1948 book Christ and Nietzsche, he wrote that when we judge the Third Reich ‘we should remember the bronze virility’ of Arno Breker’s statues, ‘the browned bodies of young ...”

“... pot never boils’. No one can wholly avoid hating ‘Old Daddy Franklin’, from whose Poor Richard’s Almanac these sayings come, especially if brought up to revere him in Public School, USA. Abraham Lincoln is the father of his people; George Washington, of his nation; but Benjamin Franklin – as it happens, a basically very decent man – hovers ...”

“... but his way of displaying it suggests that he is attempting, as well as a skilful whodunnit, a stern comment on the reader’s appetite for bad news and juicy murders. Turn back to The Merry-Go-Round in the Sea and we find the little boy touching, ‘with pleased interest’, the scars on his cousin’s ankles, souvenirs of his imprisonment by the ...”

“... style leavened by the obiter dicta of powerful individuals, plus a tendency to reiterate a few stern commandments, which one might imagine as: ‘Thou shalt not inhibit economic growth.’ ‘Thou shalt not be parochial.’ ‘Thou shalt not worship false gods – and don’t pretend thou knowest not the ones we mean.’In recent decades the divine model ...”

“... the chairman corrected her. ‘ “Mr Harold” has.’ Here, in a nutshell, is the theme of Richard Davenport-Hines’s book. Its early chapters form a heroic chronicle of upward social mobility. We first encounter an earlier Daniel Macmillan as a mid 18th-century crofter, scratching a living from the desolate but sublime landscape of the Isle of ...”

“... a letter printed in the journal Light in 1887) reveals him as already a believer, and as a stern moralist as well. He had been wondering whether or not to obtain a copy of Leigh Hunt’s Comic Dramatists of the Restoration – ‘the question being whether the mental pollution arising from Messrs Congreve, Wycherley and Co would be compensated for by ...”