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“... must learn to type.’ Well, I don’t like capitalism any more than the next man, and I do hope that when he made them redundant, Barthes’s typists set to and wrote of liberty and desire themselves; but assuming they hadn’t been doing his typing for the sheer joy of helping the world receive the thoughts of Roland Barthes, they surely weren’t ...”

“... twins usually want to stay together, and have refused separation even when it is the only hope for one of them to survive (when one has cancer, for example). Reading Alice Domurat Dreger’s book, you soon discover how little is known about conjoined twins. There have been no adequate follow-up studies to find out how well those who are separated ...”

“... lies before us’ – an ocean of ‘circumscribed possibilities’. Implicit in his ‘principle, Hope’ was the need to discriminate between short-term and long-term possibilities, and real rather than merely dogmatic limitations. For Bloch, in his public role as in his thinking, the problems of navigation were not simply a matter of enlightened confidence ...”

“... the editor managed to suppress it (‘the veriest twaddle’). This snapshot – one of many in Charles Williams’s biography – reveals two factors in Beaverbrook’s success. The first is that posh English society was no match for him. He was ‘vulgar’, but there was a charm in his self-promotion which made languid ladies and gentlemen want to be on ...”

“... Second World War: a combination of charm and exuberance that inspired millions of Americans with hope in grim times and allowed him to pursue skilful diplomatic relationships with Churchill and Stalin. His New Deal created an American version of the welfare state – a remarkable achievement in a country committed (at least rhetorically) to rugged ...”

“... with Proust, but also with Gide, who in 1908 started the monthly Nouvelle Revue Française in the hope of helping a ‘rising generation’ to escape the suffocating plushness of ‘yesterday’s writers’. The distinctive dust jackets of the NRF – plain white with austere typography in black and red – proclaimed its radical elegance, and it soon had a ...”

“... the machines people build for more everyday tasks. Even now, when the carparks at Heathrow and Charles de Gaulle are filled with sleek creations, art-directed to the max by Mercedes and Renault to convey futurity, Concorde still looks as if a crack has opened in the fabric of the Universe and a message from tomorrow has been poked through. Age ...”

“... of the Free City of Danzig in 1927, then under the protection of the League of Nations, and like Charles Dickens, Jan Neruda, James Joyce, Theodor Fontane and his acknowledged exemplar Alfred Döblin, he places his native city at the centre of his creative imagination. Grass’s best work so far is given over, again and again, to its evocation: a very ...”

“... the warders are not surprisingly opposed to this development and that the trustees are too, as I hope when I was a trustee I would have been also. I’m mildly surprised that outsourcing still persists as these days it’s so generally discredited.12 March. This last week I finish reading Common Ground by Rob Cowen and The Places In Between by Rory ...”

“... At the military academy in Saint-Cyr, which he entered in 1908, Charles de Gaulle was known as ‘the great asparagus’. But aside from the fact that he stood six feet four in his socks it was his character that drew attention: he was rebellious yet aloof, sceptical yet sure of himself. Not everyone admired his manner and his height could be a nuisance ...”

“... who can keep going longest. But it does. That is one of the clear lessons from the first volume of Charles Moore’s exhaustive and exhausting authorised biography of Margaret Thatcher, which takes the story up to the Falklands War in 1982. The person on display here is not more intelligent than her rivals, or more principled. She chops and changes as much as ...”

“... doctrinaire Marxism is the last obstacle on Germany’s road to democracy. An American scholar, Charles Maier of Harvard, has followed the historians’ dispute and written a commentary on it. The nonce word in his title raises expectations of originality which the book doesn’t fulfil. His summaries of the main contributions are useful, fair, and almost ...”

“... as in ‘Mrs Bathurst’, one of his most powerful stories – the muddle, stress, strain, hope, joy and confusion of a worldwide ‘United Services’ society seem to find their appropriately multiple tongues. No single narrator sounds quite right in his stories, but the combined hubbub of voices – voices that were once mute – forms a new and ...”

“... has seen a bill before it goes before Parliament. It was reported in October last year that King Charles had been allowed to vet emergency legislation to freeze rents in Scotland as a result of the cost of living crisis. Why? It might affect tenancies at Balmoral.The ownership and organisation of the Balmoral estate is not the cause of rural Scotland’s ...”

“... starts by announcing his subject’s date of birth; unlike most biographers, he gets it wrong. Charles Henry Maxwell Knight was born on 9 July 1900, not 4 September, under the sign of Cancer, not Virgo, however tempting it may be, for reasons which become clear in the course of the story, to assign him to the latter. Information about Maxwell Knight is ...”