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“... the evening. The former congresswoman chastised me for being insufficiently read in the works of Robert Caro. We watched each other’s bags in the line to be re-ticketed and I tried to help her with the airline app on her phone. ‘I used to chair committees and have an entire staff to do these things for me,’ she said. The last flight to Chicago left ...”

“... and scandal, Maintenant was entirely written and published by Cravan: the other contributors (Robert Miradique, W. Cooper, E. Lajeunesse, Marie Lowitska etc) are all pseudonyms. Even the advertisements bear his skewed imprint: the restaurant Chez Jourdain entices customers with the words, ‘Where can you see Van Dongen’ – the Flemish painter Kees van ...”

“... a cake and a Bible to Tehran to discuss an arms-for-hostages trade with the Ayatollah Khomeini. Robert MacNamara went to a briefing on Cuba believing that it was more than likely that he would not live through the weekend. The Central Intelligence Agency was caught, in collusion with the Mafia, plotting to poison Fidel Castro’s cigars. Ronald Reagan’s ...”

“... but now he met the youngest, 15-year-old Noel – he helped her pick up the fragments of the small green coffee cup she’d dropped. He would spend the next two years hatching schemes that would allow them to meet, most of them thwarted, by the fact that she was still at Bedales, by her protective older sisters, or by Noel herself, who held him at arm’s ...”

“... at Bafta. These sorry occasions have always been best forgotten; now their memory must be kept green against the possible arrival of the men in white coats. 19 January. Watch a video of Michael Powell’s A Matter of Life and Death (1946), the first time, I think, that I have watched it all the way through since I saw it as a child at a cinema in ...”

“... simpler. ‘Dream of London small and white and clean, the clear Thames bordered by its gardens green,’ as William Morris wrote. Such dreamers are bound to feel that our own actions have caused some of today’s ills. The most specific kind of action identifiable is government policy. One effect of British social policies in the Sixties and ...”

“... There are some notable recent success stories, from Newt Gingrich, with a PhD in history, to Robert Preston, an English ABD (all but dissertation) whose latest non-fiction book, The Hot Zone, is a bestseller. In bad times, the MLA has provided expert advice on non-academic employment. But the graduate programmes themselves have continued to reproduce ...”

“... had occurred a couple of years earlier) and was also involved, though not seriously, with a green-eyed lesbian of 35 called Czerna Wilson, who wore her bronze hair in a pigtail that reached her hips. Callahan’s sexual practices are now commonplace, Mary tells us grimly – ‘cf. John Updike’ – but at the time they made her feel ashamed, a shame ...”

“... of his contacts with the world she could no longer hear; the meals from Trinity under their green baize cloth, brought by a college servant cycling through the Cambridge streets, which she would fork into his mouth. It was recognised that her will kept them alive. He died in 1941 and she followed him within ...”

“... grew friendly with Kenneth Clark, John Sparrow, Henry Yorke, Alan Pryce-Jones, Osbert Lancaster, Robert Byron, Anthony Powell, Peter Quennell, Tom Driberg, Harold Acton, Christopher Sykes, Randolph Churchill, W.H. Auden, and lots of others, including Gaitskell once more (‘Hugh, may I stroke your bottom?’ ‘Oh, I suppose so, if you must’). With Auden ...”

“... problem is to find an alternative myth (for Rudolf Bahro and Raymond Williams ecology was the green hope, as the red faded). In Das Kapital, published a few years earlier, Karl Marx tore apart the workings of the 19th-century world. But, notoriously, he never said much about the earthly paradise he hoped for. Looking backward filled that gap. Here was the ...”

“... art) sleeps in a feverish attitude upon a bed of snow which floats upon a glassy block of pale-green banded onyx. The tight and silky surface of the skin is contrasted with the soft powdery texture of the snow, which is itself varied, becoming in parts icier and smoother. The fur of Queen Victoria’s favourite collie in Boehm’s fine portrait, or the ...”

“... followed the Reform Bill of 1832. He told a meeting of voters at the Crown Tavern, Clerkenwell Green that science had taught him ‘one important tendency’: ‘a habit of regarding facts solely as facts, and of reasoning on those facts solely with a view to the elucidation of the truth’. This may put us in mind of the famous opening of another Dickens ...”

“... It isn’t to be forgotten that he wrote prose as well as poetry, and his autobiography, The Green Fool, and the novel Tarry Flynn, flawed as it is at times by a seeping romanticism, give a clear picture of the Ireland he really knew, the rural one. No stage lrishry about them – nor indeed about ‘The Great Hunger’, the poem that made people realise ...”

“... compromise. In one essay here he excuses, he almost applauds, the Victorian philosopher T.H. Green for being, as a lecturer, perplexed and perplexing. And in another, which doesn’t persuade me at all, he goes so far as to declare ‘decadent’ John Stuart Mill’s surely commonsensical observation that ‘a certain laxity in the use of language must ...”