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“... that of the Ustasha. In President Franjo Tudjman’s ‘history’ of this period, Wastelands, we read that the victims of the war-time Jasenovac concentration camp – estimated at thirty thousand – really owed their fate to their fellow inmates, not to their Croat jailers. But this hardly excuses the flattening of Vukovar or the destruction of Dubrovnik ...”

“... lines of Sixtus V’s inscription above the door of the papal palace . . . way across Rome. They read it clearly as if to verify the perfect efficacy of the instrument . . . But still, as they all well knew, this would not satisfy their many opponents who believed that while it was good for the magnification of things on earth, the telescope was deceptive ...”

“... of the gap between the private man and his public role. But the comment does not imply that we now read the poems only as the work of a hypocrite. Thomas himself was uncomfortably aware that the moments of spiritual honesty he so wanted were liable to be staged by someone who was always unhappily aware of himself. In one of his best ...”

“... Turgenev could be read in English from 1855, Tolstoy had British and American disciples, and Dostoevsky was, in Robert Louis Stevenson’s view, ‘a devil of a swell, to be sure’. But the English-speaking world’s received ideas about Russian literature were mostly laid down in the 1910s and 1920s, the great age of Western interest in the Russian soul – ‘its passion, its tumult, its astonishing medley of beauty and vileness’, as Virginia Woolf put it ...”

“... number is getting the wrong end of the journalistic stick. Not that all journalists have actually read Scoop. Once, many years ago, when I was immured in an un-newsworthy Latin American city at the insistence of my foreign editor, I tried to suggest that it was time to move on by sending him the immortal cable front Waugh’s novel: ‘Weather here lovely, no ...”

“... that while the Sixties may have been exciting times to live through, they are hellish dull to read about. Shoe hitch-hiked through Europe, Asia Minor, North Africa. She was gang-raped in Morocco; she was in Holloway twice for drugs offences. She had a nest-egg from her hair-dressing days, but when she was really down and out – and once when she had a ...”

“... translation by S.G. Middlemore, without most of the original notes but with an introduction by Peter Burke). In this view the individualism of ‘Renaissance Man’ distinguished him from ‘Medieval Man’, who ‘was conscious of himself only as a member of a race, people, party, family or corporation’. Yet altarpieces spell out clearly that such ...”

“... on this subject are the two Michaels, Portillo and Howard, whose fathers were both immigrants, and Peter Lilley, whose holidays in his house in France enabled him to break into colloquial French in the course of a ludicrous comic turn about foreigners coming to this country to partake of the social services which he is assiduously dismantling. As always when a ...”

“... us. I suspect that, among the stories that Kafka or his Dog had in mind, were those of Johann Peter Hebel (1760-1826). At all events, Kafka called Hebel’s ‘Unexpected Reunion’ the ‘most wonderful story in the world’, and the judgment does not strike one as absurd. Hebel’s stories, or parables, first appeared in the Lutheran almanac for the ...”

“... but he does not bang on about it. He is telling a story; his mode, to borrow a phrase from Peter Burke, is thick narrative. First he sets up his characters: Abelard himself; his enemy Bernard of Clairvaux, saint and, on Clanchy’s showing, insufferable rhetorician; his lover, short-lived wife and long-lived correspondent Heloise, niece or daughter and ...”

“... with sharp gossip about your famous friends; and Waugh has the advantage that he is still widely read. Penguin keeps all the novels in print, though none of the biographies. Reluctant to give all the details, they allow that Decline and Fall is the top seller at about 25,000 a year, The Loved One a surprising second, Brideshead Revisited doing nicely at ...”

“... assassination is the most visually documented operation in the history of espionage. No need to read WikiLeaks’s unexpurgated accounts of skulduggery or even the scrupulous novels of John le Carré: to see what a mission really looks like one only has to watch the Al-Bustan Rotana’s CCTV footage, released on the internet by the Dubai Government Media ...”

“... take confirmation in it from the other books under review. Charles Tomlinson’s Annunciations and Peter Porter’s Possible Worlds share Renaissance Virgins for cover illustrations. Tomlinson’s is Lorenzo Lotto’s Annunciation, in which the angel has just leapt spectacularly over the balcony, terrifying the cat, to make his declaration to an overcome and ...”

“... Professor Peter Gay is an eminent American cultural historian of German origin, an enthusiastic convert to Freudian doctrine, and an honorary member of the American Psychoanalytical Association – you can’t, as a warmly sympathetic biographer of Freud, do-better than that. The sheer amount of biographical, historical and psychoanalytical detail that has gone into the making of this Life is, as far as I can see, unparalleled in the literature of its subject; and so are the care and informed intelligence with which this stupendous mass of facts, conjectures and speculations has been sifted, as well as the attractive, good-humoured and unstrenuous way most of it has been presented ...”

“... remedy. Showing understandable irritation with self-styled Keynesians (‘who had usually read no more of Keynes than most Marxists had read of Marx’), he makes no bones about saying: ‘I abandoned Keynesianism in 1975.’ To call him a convert to ‘the monetarist mumbo-jumbo’, however, is merely a polemical ...”