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“... historical writing as there was on the subject – the work of the Anglo-German economic historian William Otto Henderson was the outstanding instance – tended to focus on refuting the allegations of violence and brutality that had led to the empire’s dismantling and redistribution at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919. By the 1960s these arguments were no ...”

“... We have moved from Athens to Auschwitz: the West’s political model is now the concentration camp rather than the city state; we are no longer citizens but detainees, distinguishable from the inmates of Guantanamo not by any difference in legal status, but only by the fact that we have not yet had the misfortune to be incarcerated – or unexpectedly ...”

“... narrative finds Orwell working for the BBC during the Second World War, in the cubicle next to William Empson. Orwell immediately propositioned Empson’s partner, Hetta Crouse, but to no effect. ‘It was the smell, Empson grimly implied.’ Sutherland reports that Hetta and Orwell’s first wife, Eileen, were in agreement about the deterrent of ...”

“... And Breton did start out, along with fellow poets Louis Aragon and Paul Éluard, in the Dadaist camp, won over by its charismatic leaders, Tristan Tzara and Francis Picabia, who had converged on Paris as soon as possible after the First World War. Despite the internationalism of the moment, Breton gave the Surrealist movement a national cast in the ...”

“... were preoccupied with the US, alert to Vietnam and the growing anti-war movement. Others invoked William Blake and Rimbaud (‘the disordering of all the senses’), Allen Ginsberg and the scary William Burroughs. All exchanged their expertise freely as they strode the fields of cool together; they were mostly kind to ...”

“... between the people who divide it in two and those who don’t, Cameron is squarely in the former camp. During the summer of 2014 he was putting the finishing touches to a government reshuffle that would see him shunt his old friend Michael Gove from the Department of Education to a new role as chief whip. In effect he was clearing the decks for the following ...”

“... to commit so agreeable a cheat.’ But the charge of forgery stuck, particularly in the pro-Pope camp, as in David Mallet’s ‘Epistle to Mr Pope’ (1733), which describes Theobald as a thief and scavenger of Shakespearean leftovers: ‘See him on Shakespeare pore, intent to steal/Poor farce, by fragments, for a third-day meal.’ One obvious answer to ...”

“... in the Nebraska State Historical Society archives) of the 14-year-old Cather dressed as ‘William Cather, Jr’. For four years of her adolescence – even as bewildered relatives and neighbours looked on – the tomboyish Cather doggedly adopted this male alter ego as her primary public identity. She cut her hair short, wore boys’ jackets, ties and ...”

“... letters and journals of Flaubert’s trip to the Middle East in 1849-50 with his friend Maxime Du Camp. It was here that I first became consciously aware of Flaubert’s unmediated personality – Steegmuller called the book ‘a sensibility on tour’. Everything noisily overlapped: the exotic and the everyday, the comic and the grotesque, the dream and the ...”

“... poets and seekers. Heavily dosed on Gertrude Stein, and fired up by a chance encounter with William Carlos Williams, Welch was confirmed in his destiny as an outsider, a casual labourer, cab driver, fisherman, backwoods hermit. He had his task, as writer and recorder, but, unlike Snyder, he never found his place. One day, according to rumour, he walked ...”

“... omnipotent state which could dispense with the nameless as a matter of whim, seems almost cosily camp next to Kelman’s brutal Conspiracy of Universal Authorities bent on oppressing the Glasgow poor. Sammy, the semi-wino whose person and consciousness lie at the centre of Kelman’s new novel, wakes up in a police cell with a pounding head, a bruised one ...”

“... on this scale demands an object. The will whose triumph is bodied forth in Leni Riefenstahl’s camp classic found its pretext in the Versailles indemnities and the ‘stab in the back’ myth, but its real cause in the idea that the will itself could be subject to constraint. By contrast with the main argument of Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of ...”

“... north of the Trent and in Calais, then clipping his wings. Warwick learned to tolerate the bluff William Hastings, a Leicestershire squire whom Edward made his principal fixer and chief pimp, but was then blindsided by the king’s clandestine marriage to the widowed commoner Elizabeth Woodville, after which Warwick and the Nevilles were frozen out at ...”

“... night march to Cumberland’s encampment at Nairn and surprise the enemy while they were still in camp, dozy and hungover, it was assumed, after celebrating Cumberland’s birthday. A good idea, which failed because of an unforgivable lack of intelligence and planning: it was much further to the enemy positions than Lord George Murray or the prince had ...”

“... with it an unspoken obligation to talk personally. Plomley became part of the furniture. There’s William Trevor ruminating unshowily on the job of writing; the just pre-Pennies from Heaven Dennis Potter remembering his Forest of Dean childhood; and Charlotte Rampling, very solemn, on the death of her sister and making The Night Porter – Plomley managing to ...”