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“... to any intelligent reader. The title may suggest a Qumranic fantastication, or something like Robert Graves’s King Jesus, but Lane Fox’s purpose, though ambitious, is sober enough. He offers an ancient historian’s view of the Bible. This is ‘a book about evidence and historical truth, not about faith. It is unauthorised because it addresses ...”

“... have produced any better or more effective public servants than Oliver Franks, Edwin Plowden, Robert Hall, Edward Bridges, Alec Cairncross, Edward Hall-Patch, Richard Hopkins and Roger Makins, to name only a few of the ‘mandarins’ who served the Labour Government so loyally. Therein lay the problem, however. They did what their Labour masters ...”

“... recording their fashionable clothes, pink cheeks and languid arrogance. Some, like the master of Robert Burns’s ‘Twa Dogs’, had set out in a ‘frolic daft’ simply To make a tour an’ tak a whirl To learn bon ton and see the worl’. But the ostensible purpose of the Grand Tour – a term coined in the mid-century – was the completion of a ...”

“... crisis’ and not nearly so much of the ugly xenophobia seen in 2015. Despite anxieties about a winter of discontent – gas prices have risen sevenfold since the last cold season – we have yet to see the ‘riots’ predicted by Germany’s foreign minister earlier this year. The decision to make Ukraine a candidate for EU membership has given the bloc a ...”

“... Opponents of this analysis – notably Matthew Goodwin, whose Revolt on the Right (written with Robert Ford) first identified Ukip voters as older and poorer than the general population – argue that the Leave/Remain faultline is essentially a cultural one. Among working-class voters identified as former or potential Labour supporters, the divisive issue ...”

“... are clearly a labour of love. Auden may have needed the money – he mostly wrote prose in the winter in New York to finance summers writing poetry in Europe – but he evidently took pride in his facility and his craftsmanship. Robert Lowell responded with a fellow craftsman’s appreciativeness when he observed of ...”

“... best known as the uncle of the man who cheated in the quiz show that was made into a film by Robert Redford (in Quiz Show Carl van Doren is played with magnificent stateliness by Paul Scofield). The book is straightforward narrative history, but it takes its curious title from the fact that it was written at the birth of the United Nations, on whose ...”

“... attitude to their fine furniture and irreproachable outfits; excessive patricianness also leads to Robert Lowell-style manic episodes and nasty yachting accidents. Third place goes to Boris by virtue of Russian soulfulness. Second goes to Theo’s mother, a scrappy woman from Kansas who funded an advanced degree in art history by working as a fashion model on ...”

“... Arriving​ at his prep school in the bleak winter of 1918 the ten-year-old Osbert Lancaster was made even more miserable than the average new bug by the fact that St Ronan’s, Worthing was a spectacularly sporty school. The headmaster, Stanley Harris, had captained England at football and was also a distinguished cricketer and rugby player ...”

“... bardic conception of the poet’s role elaborated in Thomson’s preface to the second edition of Winter derives in part from Hill’s critical writings). He also knew the critic John Dennis, John Dyer (the author of the loco-descriptive smash-hit Grongar Hill), Richard Savage, Nahum Tate (the Poet Laureate) and Edward Young (Night Thoughts). For a ...”

“... business down, and he goes looking for a new line of work. Rummaging in a junk shop on a draughty winter morning, he comes across a dilapidated book. He steals it, reads it, and becomes obsessed. This book is the manuscript of Gould’s Book of Fish, which immediately announces itself as something special. Its binding emits a supernatural glow, and – rather ...”

“... a discussion of Brecht’s novel A Penny for the Poor, was published in the Partisan Review for winter 1939. The previous number had contained an interview he did with Ignazio Silone, and he’d also published a few translations and pseudonymous stories. He had just turned 30, and saw the Brecht piece as an auspicious entry into literary reviewing, yet it ...”

“... and tales of goblins and fairies and witches, told to raise shivers of pleasurable fear on a dark winter night. By uncoupling itself from belief, the vision of myth/fairy tale can be angled more sharply towards other tasks. Voltaire showed the way: from his vantage point, Zeus turning into a bull, Nebuchadnezzar into a wild animal, and the Beast bridegrooms ...”

“... shut, the books become lost to me, in the fear that I have been lost to them.It is a frugal winter. The jumpers are on and the heating switched off so I turn the pages with cold hands, which is a kind of nostalgia in itself.The Bluest Eye, Morrison’s first novel, published in 1970, opens with a brief, antic mash-up of a child’s first reading ...”

“... connected with one of the four elements. The humours were like something beyond themselves: like winter, like delved earth, like the rotation of the stars in the heavens.What kind of person were you? Clues to your particular composition of humours were abundant. Did you tend to have pleasant dreams, of dancing or laughing or embracing beautiful women? Did ...”