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“... have any reputation outside this country.Moore was an anomaly. He didn’t fade in the brighter light of peace but instead made an international reputation. Yet much of the material in his collected writings – like the answer to Russell quoted above – seems to be conciliatory, as though he felt he had been inadvertently gross or unnecessarily difficult ...”

“... May Day marches were enormous. According to the Sydney Morning Herald’s senior political writer, Alan Ramsey, the machinations had been long, intricate and expensive: ‘Nobody believes the Government was ever an innocent bystander in the Machiavellian conniving that went on in ministerial offices and corporate board-rooms ... in the two years since the ...”

“... about its title – and about what names entitle people to – the title has to be read in the light of the book’s epigraph. Taken from Simone Weil’s The Need for Roots, it plays off, as epigraphs must, the title of the novel against the title that is the source of the quotation: ‘Mr Phillips and the Need for Roots’. Tarquin Winot, the now infamous ...”

“... at having survived soldier-comrades, known and unknown, and his emergence, subsequently, into the light of a history which continued nonetheless. (He began this last following a visit with Nancy Cunard to the Lascaux wall-paintings, themselves then newly come to light.) The two books in effect describe the political arc of ...”

“... some scab trucks through the gates, and the resulting bonfire of overturned vehicles gave a lovely light. In the next edition of the People’s World, the splash headline was a very Sixties one: ‘Fremont – In The Midnight Hour’. It competed for space with another, smaller headline, which announced the victory of Salvador Allende’s ‘Popular ...”

“... those condemned to live in fallout shadows dig and scrape. A dowser and ley line tracker called Alan Hayday, formerly employed on the assembly line of the Ford Motor Company in Dagenham, contacted me to pass on his research into a tunnel he claimed to have discovered running from Sutton House, a Tudor mansion on the ridge above the culverted Hackney ...”

“... and guards in a mock jail, took a close interest in the Iraq prison abuses when they came to light in 2004. At Stanford, guards and their clients seem to have adapted seamlessly to life in a state correctional facility, and it is no great surprise to learn that during the Saddam era, Abu Ghraib had been designed on an architectural blueprint pioneered by ...”

“... panting with the effort and looking for signs of danger.’ In his diary, he confessed to ‘a light, dry feeling of contraction, as when you stand before a man ready to punch you, waiting for the blow.’ The KPD polled 13 per cent of the vote, and was promptly proscribed by Hitler’s ascendant party. Less than a month after this, in early April, an ...”

“... strange that the poem was completed just a decade after Eliot’s ‘Little Gidding’: there seem light years between Larkin’s melancholy scepticism, his urge to bring religion down to earth, and Eliot’s high-toned, abstract, prayerful urge to coax his images into some large, suggestive, mystical space. And yet there are moments in ‘Little ...”

“... though they were picked principally for their skill at chess. One of them, another Kingsman, was Alan Turing, who, with Gordon Welchman of Sidney Sussex, was foremost among those who decoded Ultra, encyphered on the Enigma machine, and, perhaps more than any single person, helped to save us from defeat in the battle of the Atlantic. When suddenly Japanese ...”

“... figures in his life had turned his mind towards Marxism: his cousin Phyllis Kemp, and the composer Alan Bush. He signed up, albeit briefly, to the Communist Party of Great Britain before switching his allegiance from Stalin to Trotsky. British communists regarded support for Trotsky, by then expelled from the Soviet Union, as ideologically suspect, and ...”

“... Again, his eye for detail strengthens his argument. The manhauling of heavy naval (as against light Inuit) sledges was one of the most deadly flaws in the Navy’s methods of Arctic exploration. Strangely, to the English there was something noble, something romantic, about strong young men marching in harness through the Arctic wastes, enduring ...”

“... It’s a theory with which one could quarrel, or debate, in many cases, but it certainly casts a light both on literary texts and (again) on drawings and paintings. Furthermore Wack has provided eighty pages of little-known Latin text and facing-page translation, thrusting forward the evidence for anyone who wants to argue. And who can argue with the thought ...”

“... ennobled. While Nantwich was incarcerated, his Sudanese servant of 28 years’ standing, ‘the light of my life’, was killed in ‘an act of racial hatred and ignorance’. It isn’t quite clear how far the events of The Swimming-Pool Library lead Will to realise the limitations of his own behaviour and world-view. For the reader, those limitations ...”

“... characterise nobody but Clive James. It would matter less if he were less ignorant. He describes Alan Wearne’s verse novel The Nightmarkets as ‘so solidly or anyway heavily involved in the tradition of Pound, Williams, Zukofsky and the yellow pages of the telephone directory’. Here, in neat reversal, only the joke is right. Wearne does have a telephone ...”