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“... which happened either just before or just after the crash, and which would never have come to light had it not been for the financial crisis and the resulting surge in attention – mainly legislative attention – to the murkier deeds of the banks. The simplest of these stories concerns HBOS. This is another familiar narrative in that it involves a ...”

“... no reason: yet is always correct and just in his remarks. He is low in stature – long visage – light hair – coarse features – ungaitly – awkward – is a fiddler – loves ale – likes the girls– somewhat idle, – hates work. As Bate says, this is condescending, but it also shows ‘terrific enthusiasm’. The last sentence of Drury’s ...”

“... deadly to the book (‘Only Saul Bellow and [James] Baldwin are shown in any kind of unattractive light and then with care and preparation of context in order to strike no undue foul blow’), sapping its force, piddling away its momentum. Making It may have been intended as a tell-all, but what it delivered was a tepid modified limited hangout, to borrow a ...”

“... stages of a child’s growth – all is unexpected. But there is also that strange distance, the light veil of alienation thrown over everything.And then there is the same light veil thrown over everything when I go back to Britain. When I was first living in the States, I was eager to keep up with life ‘back at ...”

“... and (still awaiting completion) services.Today the union that Thatcher did so much to shape is light on social justice, tough on treasury borrowing, fixated by opening up markets to competition. If it weren’t for the electorate’s concerns over immigration, the Tory Brexiteers would look as though they were stuck in a time warp. After all, the EU long ...”

“... stated as heard in the present, already over. Knowlson, who quotes this passage from a letter to Donald Mc Whinnie, draws no lesson from it, other than the somewhat limp, and question-begging, suggestion that the world of How It Is is ‘related sometimes closely but rarely unambiguously to Beckett’s own life’. Certainly all possibility of a lesson ...”

“... provoked howls of indignation from SPD members. But though Schröder may have given it the green light, the decisive push for Agenda 2010, as Anke Hassel and Christof Schiller showed in Der Fall Hartz IV (2010), came from local government and the insurance and labour market agencies struggling to cope with crisis levels of unemployment. The Kohl government ...”

“... era was cold and dark and bleak, but there was a touch of pink in the east and a sense of the light slowly but steadily strengthening. In 1945, more than 70 per cent of the population was working-class, employed either as rural labourers or industrial workers. Over the next decade, their story would be one of growing prosperity and wellbeing, of widening ...”

“... in placing Unitarianism within a wider tradition of dissenting Christianity; but in truth, as Donald Davie robustly maintained in A Gathered Church (1978), it hardly does justice to the enormous heterodoxy of Unitarianism to think of it as a form of Christianity at all. Certainly Coleridge came to think in that way. According to a story recorded by his ...”

“... Life?’Admittedly, the gamesome poet is often a rather ponderous creature (‘Auden Ludens’, as Donald Davie pointed out, was often ‘Auden in short pants, acting the little horror’). But his vision of other people playing rarely feels actorly, and it takes us close to the centre of what art meant for him. In a lecture on ‘Poetry and Freedom’, given ...”

“... include every approach or outlook in a work of joint scholarship, the omission is still odd in the light of T.H. Aston‘s long service as editor of Past and Present, that French-inspired, Oxford-produced academic journal, featuring articles on the interconnections between structures, society and belief systems. While the methods of intellectual history are ...”

“... characteristically, as a collection of disconnected bits and pieces, which can be used to cast a light-hearted sense of discrepancy over the contemporary scene. England turns out to be an old curiosity shop disintegrating among the gleaming hangars of a brand new retail park. McKie is the grizzled proprietor, momentarily bringing past and present together to ...”

“... is like selling citizens a part of themselves. In the AMC series Mad Men the central character, Donald Draper, is a senior creative at Sterling Cooper, a top-flight Madison Avenue advertising firm in the early 1960s. What was his grounding for this station? He was a car salesman in a former life, with the stress on former life, and a different man ...”

“... a retired admiral who had served as Bush's deputy director at the CIA; and, to a lesser extent, Donald Gregg, Bush’s national security adviser and another veteran of CIA covert operations. Moreau’s team mostly worked out of a room near the National Military Command Centre on the ground floor of the Pentagon. They could also unobtrusively man a desk or ...”

“... that will give you all the hell you could want.‘Horror starts, like charity, at home,’ as Donald Davie put it, and the phrase could stand as epigraph to much of Waugh, especially his masterpiece of tangled modernism and barbarity, A Handful of Dust (1934). This time the protagonist is Basil’s anti-type, someone who is doomed from the start: Tony ...”