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“... about Cyprus, other novels. T.S. Eliot greatly admired The Black Book, and two early novels, Pied Piper of Lovers and Panic Spring, have recently been reissued by ELS, a Canadian press. Still, so much of Durrell’s reputation rests, or fails to rest, on the Quartet that this does seem a good place to start one’s second (or third) look. The Folio ...”

“... of many a lesser figure. In what might be called the peripheral stakes Dylan Thomas and even David Jones have had more attention in some quarters – in the case of Dylan Thomas, with a wild publicity which has had little enough to do with his work. MacDiarmid, it is true, has had a share of irrelevant – and sometimes damaging – publicity, mainly ...”

“... hic et nunc’. Affectively, though, they are very different: Barthes plays the ‘seductive pied piper’, Damisch the ‘tough love’ father. Pedagogically, too, they take opposite approaches. Barthes teaches his students how to pare a project down to ‘a couple of essential issues’, while Damisch shows them ‘how independent fields of knowledge can ...”

“... Brigaders, Trotskyites, Communists, pacifists failed by their tribunals. The playwright David Hare declared recently that working-class conscripts now met ‘the officer class’ for the first time and rebelled; but plenty had met the people issuing orders, at least since Peterloo. Moreover, an Army largely unemployed except in training or retreat ...”

“... for his own psychic traumas. In this reading Delany is following Brandt’s earlier critics, David Mellor and Ian Jeffrey, who identified in Brandt’s photographs coded expressions of his disturbed psyche. They contain what Delany identifies as ‘symbols and obsessions peculiar to himself’.Ever since Brandt became the focus of academic study in the ...”

“... themselves fêted as bearers of a tradition that for decades had seemed moribund and despised. David Craig, then a Marxist literary critic studying in Cambridge, went to Edinburgh to do some research in the early 1960s. He told Neat that ‘song was in the air, and the influence of Hamish everywhere apparent.’ Robertson and Jimmy MacBeath were among the ...”

“... The Commander has become the ashy residue of Neo-Romanticism, out there in the Fens, a John Piper with backbone, silhouetted against lowering skies, fretting to escape the inconvenience of some vulgar stiff and get at those rough flint churches. Philip Larkin (sans bicycle clips) with a Byronic makeover. Larkin reimagined by Barbara Cartland, all scowls ...”

“... the proprietors might be. It is in the very nature of proprietorial control that those who pay the piper will insist on calling the tune, and this is the source of a seemingly irreconcilable conflict between the proprietorial interest and the editorial interest in the running of newspapers. A free press has to guard not only against the impositions of the ...”

“... about his second film, Le Petit Soldat, he invoked Welles’s The Lady From Shanghai, which David Thomson has seen as ‘deconstructing’ film noir. Une femme est une femme reminded him of Lubitsch’s supposed ‘failure’, Design For Living, and Richard Quine’s decidedly minor My Sister Eileen. Godard treated Hollywood as a kind of conceptual ...”

“... fulfil. His summaries of the main contributions are useful, fair, and almost as lengthy as Piper Verlag’s Historikerstreit, on which he draws. He shows how the attempt by the ‘revisionists’ to ‘relativise’ the Final Solution has become part of a concerted effort to provide the country with a ‘usable past’. He has buttressed the whole ...”

“... of the proper ascription of credit, opting for the showy (e.g. Lord Lovat’s arrival with his piper) rather than the death-defying slog that preceded it. This youthful book is both magnanimous and fair but later histories and memoirs were not so understanding and there would be much hoovering up of credit not least by Montgomery himself. It was this ...”

“... one would expect from any collection of pictures, except for the jarring and very public Star of David which feels eerily as if it had invaded the private space of the pictures without its bearers having noticed. There were 1536 such pictures in the first, 1994 French edition; 1834 in the 1995 edition; another 497 in a January 1996 supplement; and a further ...”

“... a gross overestimation of the likely casualties of German bombing raids, was called Operation Pied Piper, and it plays a central part in Evelyn Waugh’s seriocomic novel of the Phoney War, Put Out More Flags.A photograph from the period, taken in Le Mans, nicely catches the mood. Two teams are playing football. One side (clearly the Brits) is clad in ...”

“... as the valet’s perspective on the future of the continent. Thomas Meaney GreeceTwo years ago, David Cameron saw himself out of office, respecting the result of the referendum he had unwisely called. For three years now, Alexis Tsipras has clung to power in Athens by disrespecting the results of his own referendum. The Eurozone’s one-time guerrilla ...”

“... palace coup in Oman in 1970 and – last but not least – three abortive plots, farmed out to David Stirling and sundry other mercenaries under the initially benevolent eye of Western intelligence services, to overthrow the Gaddafi regime between 1971 and 1973 in an episode known as the Hilton Assignment. At the same time, the story of Libya in 2011 gives ...”