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“... chapter is done in his characteristic mode, which reads like García Márquez translated by Dr Johnson: Karatavuk, for instance, narrates his experiences at Gallipoli in an enjoyably wide-eyed ‘and then, and then’ style. Elsewhere, though, people are ‘immanitous’, ‘but little bequalmed’, ‘perseverant’ or ‘inexplicably ...”

“... is a send-up. There’s an infuriating frivolity, cynicism and finally a vacuousness.’ Christopher Booker: ‘Peter Cook once said, back in the 1960s, “Britain is in danger of sinking giggling into the sea,” and I think we really are doing that now.’The key word here is ‘giggling’ (or in some versions of the ...”

“... laudatory articles on contemporary architects such as Mies van der Rohe, Walter Gropius, Philip Johnson, Frank Lloyd Wright and Buckminster Fuller. The architects were themselves portrayed as playboys, the architectural and sexual revolutions intimately enmeshed. In Pornotopia, Beatriz Preciado writes that in 1950s issues of Playboy, ‘there were more ...”

“... agree it’s best if he doesn’t black up. Of Cato’s triumphant first night in 1713, Samuel Johnson wrote unkindly: ‘The Whigs applauded every line in which liberty was mentioned, as a satire on the Tories; and the Tories echoed every clap, to show that the satire was unfelt.’ Oakeshott’s revival is similarly supported by what ...”

“... who furnished all the information for six chapters, and constantly pops up – as much as Messrs Johnson, Tyson and Winter. They would appear to be beyond criticism – and certainly by me. They have succeeded in relieving the dry tone of their book with an urbane eloquence – the expositions of complex textual history, like the individual sentences, are ...”

“... R.W. Johnson​ is a long-standing contributor to the LRB. His first appearance was on the letters page in 1981, where he took ‘mild issue’ with a review of his most celebrated book, The Long March of the French Left. In 1984 he wrote a memorable piece about national intelligence agencies, and the following year, a homage to Pierre Mendès France, one of the best pieces the paper has published on postwar politics in France ...”

“... time to denounce publicly those journalists who had dared to print the name of the head of MI6, Christopher Curwen. The heads of the CIA and the KGB, William Casey and Victor Chebrikov, are of course public figures. But that, as Mr Ingham would say, is not the point. What the point is remains obscure. In 1932 the novelist Compton Mackenzie was tried for a ...”

“... and honest the while.Larkin clears of cant not only his mind but his mouth, and not only his. Dr Johnson steadies Larkin’s mind (‘Now one must clear one’s mind of cant’), while at the same time encouraging him to heights of irresistible albeit temporary concession which are a comic counterpart to the great verse-paragraphs of ‘The Vanity of Human ...”

“... Christopher Logue’s War Music is not ‘a translation in the accepted sense’. It’s not clear why, having said this, he should invoke Johnson’s remark that a translation’s merit should be judged by ‘its effect as an English poem’, since Johnson was talking about translations, whereas Logue’s poem is a variety of ‘poetical imitation’ and belongs to a perfectly good tradition of English poems based on or played off against an older (often Classical) original ...”

“... demands vast ingenuity, and to avoid theorising requires vast honesty.’ In his vast honesty, Dr Johnson stands as the greatest of English critics, and his greatness is not distinct from his sustained and rational opposition to philosophy and to theory. ‘The task of criticism’ was, for Johnson, to ‘establish ...”

“... the 19th century as a whole. His major precursors are Quiller-Couch, Yeats, Auden, George MacBeth, Christopher Ricks and Ian Fletcher. I don’t intend a Shopper’s Guide, but I’ll start with two small complaints. Unlike Fletcher, Karlin doesn’t give explanatory notes, except for a few dialect words and phrases in foreign languages. Reading Davidson’s ...”

“... Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government, published in 2016, the political scientists Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels described what happened when sharks started attacking bathers off the New Jersey shore in the summer of 1916. It was a wholly unexpected turn of events: sharks had never been seen that far north before. When lifeguards began ...”

“... elements – a letter to the author’s father, reminiscences of a dead sister, chats with Christopher Hitchens, tales of Oxford and the old New Statesman office, and so on. But fierce reading is what this book is about, and these other passages seem intrusive. It would have been enough to observe a good writer wrestling with material that clearly ...”

“... End (1910), and discovered that the mistaken association with ‘mean’ was old enough for Johnson to record it in his Dictionary. Now the wrong usage is right, and mine is obsolete, as the ‘right’ sense of jejune, and the ‘correct’ homogeneous, may be in a hundred years or less. I am saying, half-heartedly conservative, that some resistance is ...”

“... of the joint) about halfway through it. Here is where he had chummed up with Henry Fairlie, Paul Johnson, George Gale, Kingsley Amis and many of his other life-long boon companions, whose tales of debauch and dun and infidelity are the salt of the book. He had nice manners, and a generous style which he probably didn’t think of as democratic. He was aware ...”