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“... the source of Turner’s interest. Litter and debris are for him emblems of the fallacy of hope, intimations of mortality. Rubbish attracts him because it is the favour to which we must all come, the condition to which time will reduce even our most monumental achievements. As the sun sinks on Carthage, that proud city seems already to be dissolving ...”

“... pained) observer of Kipling’s idées fixes. He thought Bateman’s, which dated from the time of Charles I, an ‘oddly discordant setting for its owner’s furious modernism and journalism’. But it was one of Kipling’s talents not to be abashed by discordance. In a letter written for publication in Filson Young’s The Complete Motorist (1904), Kipling ...”

“... the loss of cultural memory are said to be the order of the day (an all too reductive idea), what hope is there for literary criticism which depends on remembrance and cultural knowledge? Steiner’s answer is deceptively simple: auctoritas. As a critic, Steiner believes ‘in the relations, as these were classically conceived, between words and ...”

“... code names in the computer, names relating to literature and philosophy, so that one is codenamed Charles Dickens, another Bertrand Russell. The killer is one of these: code name Wittgenstein. The trouble with such dead-clever stuff as this is that it wavers between seriousness and farce, and also that the cleverness makes more jarring the frequent lapses ...”

“... fluid along to safeguard his investment, intending to display the twins dead or alive. ‘I hope these will prove profitable as a curiosity,’ he wrote to his wife, Susan, who eventually undertook much of the daily work of managing the twins. Onlookers flocked to view the Siamese Twins and paid a high price – fifty cents or the equivalent – for the ...”

“... forced into a name change – it was banned by the French government for insulting the corpse of Charles de Gaulle. In a remarkable essay published in the Nouvel Observateur Roussel made two essential points. The first concerned French foreign policy: I don’t much like it when a head of state speaks of the dead as heroes. It usually happens because ...”

“... trying to convert the knots and twists of Russian and French sentences into intelligible and, I hope, fluent English; I’ve also translated books and articles. On the one hand, ‘You talk – I talk’; on the other, ‘You write – I write.’ The translator has time to change, edit and refine his text. He also has a desk, entire shelves full of ...”

“... the centre of family life an in-built disappointment, an emotional investment in what is missing. Charles and Isobel in Human Croquet collect things belonging to their absent mother – a shoe, a powder compact, a lock of hair – but fail to make a life for themselves in the present. In the short story ‘Temporal Anomaly’, Marianne, who has been dead for ...”

“... After his suicide attempt, Lau turned to writing on financial matters, perhaps in the hope of persuading German princes to support freedom of religion on economic grounds. He continued to lament the failure of his radical writings, which he had published anonymously: ‘I have piped loudly and melodiously enough, but they did not want to ...”

“... as an opponent of the modern tomfoolery that claimed to deal with lunatics without coercion. We hope, too, to admire John Conolly and W.A.F. Browne, born thirty and forty years respectively after Haslam. Both were genteel but poor boys who had to struggle for an education; medicine was the obvious career for them. Conolly lectured briefly at the new ...”

“... in such an extreme setting, from which the physical signs of culture had fallen away, what hope was there for the verbal culture, even of the vernacular autobiography? The chief sign of this strain was a double style ...’ This ‘double style’ (not ‘alternative styles’, out ‘a fissure within a single narrative’) encompassed attempts at ...”

“... to where we began in Blackpool. For years now I have set out on this dismal pilgrimage filled with hope and health and holiday sun, only to return filled with alcohol, tobacco fumes and hot air. The conference season is an annual ritual, a ceremonial enactment of the entire political liturgy, including the beatification of leaders and the veneration of ...”

“... left much to be desired. It was simply premature in the Seventies to hold any realistic hope of addressing the fundamental nature of cancers, since the necessary biological methods were only just then being developed. Nonetheless, the millions of dollars poured into the pipe-dream of finding the virus that causes human cancers were not wholly ...”

“... the androgens, oestrogens and progestins were increasingly used in cancer therapy, and in 1966 Charles Huggins won the Nobel Prize for research into the relationship between hormones and prostate cancer. But medical enthusiasm for hormone therapy faded in favour of other chemotherapeutic interventions. Hormone therapy came to be regarded as a ...”

“... fact and out of context. It’s worth having a look, however, if only for the quick camera pan to Charles Rangel, the 18-term black Congressman from the 15th Congressional district of New York, which includes Harlem, the Upper West Side and Washington Heights. He is smirking, regarding Obama like a crocodile gazing at a chicken McNugget. Rangel was one of ...”