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“... Alternatively, setting her sights lower within the Chinese community would have been a major loss of face. Under the circumstances, a poor Portuguese was a creative solution.’ The novel recounts Wallace’s adventures among the Poons, and the gradual way he rises to become head of the family. One of the book’s strengths – one of Mo’s great ...”

“... pulverising concrete defences, these ‘funnies’, as they were called, were the brainchildren of Major-General Sir Percy Hobart, a highly enlightened professional soldier whose photograph is reproduced in Juliet Gardiner’s book. Bespectacled, beak-nosed, with a fine long, crafty face and solid chin, he looks like Hannibal’s or Caesar’s favourite staff ...”

“... Hillis Miller makes the convincing point that Bloom’s noisily proclaimed debt to Frye (‘The major literary critic in the English language ... a kind of Miltonic figure’) conceals his real obsession with Eliot (‘the abominable Eliot’). Bloom’s whole critical project, which emphasises the struggle for imaginative breathing-space between a poet and ...”

“... for his or her job. Meanwhile basic science is being seriously neglected, and some of the major functions of government science, such as the survey work of the Institute of Geological Sciences, are being cut back because they cannot attract ‘customers’s in advance of obtaining results. Privatisation carries the Rothschild principle into the realm ...”

“... human type. Most of this comes out very clearly and sympathetically in this little book. But one major factor is missing. Look at his name. Lev Davidovitch Landau was not just a Russian: like many of his brightest pupils, he was also a Jew. Was he really ‘born too late’? Had he been a student in the 1950s, he might not have found a patron such as Kapitza ...”

“... and a half decades, to consider the idea of progress today is necessarily to hold a mirror up to a major shift in modern consciousness. Because we not merely are so confused but also know ourselves to be so confused, a strongly distorting mirror is likely to be more illuminating than one which, with heedless fidelity, reproduces the full range of existing ...”

“... indeed. She liked the Reagan people very much. They’re so vulgar.’ The story illustrates the major problem of writing a biography about Margaret Thatcher: personally, she is neither nice nor interesting. She has immense energy, remarkable tenacity and stamina, and a good brain. But she has a shallow mind, little imagination and an immense, bullying ...”

“... The dust jacket of the final volume of Bevis Hillier’s epic life of John Betjeman shows the poet laureate seized by giggles. In this lengthy coda to Hillier’s authorised biography Betjeman appears in many lights, but he’s rarely carefree. ‘Nothing frightens me more than the thought of dying,’ he told a friend in 1958 ...”

“... the Society’s history in more than six hundred pages, ably translated from German by John Noël Dillon. Markus Friedrich’s volume could be described as relentless, but its barrage of information is a trustworthy basis from which to begin to understand one of the most remarkable products of Counter-Reformation energy. The Jesuits have always ...”

“... approach to the political system and ‘modernisation’, the Blair Government is much more like John Major’s than people have noticed. The attack, both rhetorical and actual, on local government, and particularly on local education authorities, continues. Thus the fate of grammar schools is now to be decided by ‘parents’ – that is, by people ...”

“... high) net contribution to the EEC budget, before helping to propel the next major stage of market integration – the Single European Act of 1987 under the president of the European Commission, Jacques Delors – from which she expected British financial services in particular to benefit.It was not long before any such linear prospect ...”

“... Literary Revival at the turn of the 20th century and delivers incisive judgments on a series of major figures, and the precociously magisterial Short History of Irish Literature (1986). Deane had a Marxist mode that could be abstract but was grounded in his hard upbringing in the Bogside. He put Derry into Derrida and worked with Edward Said. That Ireland ...”

“... perhaps of the empire as a whole, is a view of the world as a zero sum game: if the US and other major nations are up, Russia is down. And there are enough examples of foreign states reacting to Russia’s efforts to achieve some market share for its products by creating tariff and other barriers for that belief to have more than a purely pathological ...”

“... the French Republic. Just before the arrests, an English medical student studying in Edinburgh, John Edmonds Stock, had been sent down to London by Watt with a letter to the London Corresponding Society inviting them to mount a similar insurrection. Hearing just in time that he was a wanted man, he disappeared, to resurface later in Philadelphia, where he ...”

“... William Small was teaching Rhetoric and Belles Lettres to Jefferson at William and Mary. By 1768 John Witherspoon from the Laigh Kirk, Paisley, was basing his Princeton lectures on Blair’s Rhetoric. In 1781 Wither spoon coined the pejorative term ‘Americanism’, by analogy with ‘Scotticism’. Strong connections between Scottish and American cultures ...”