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“... but is not very often funny; Garland can be quite sharp, but his drawing is both fussy and crude. Gerald Scarfe is essentially a caricaturist; Marc and Osbert Lancaster are purveyors of one-line gags. The only comparison is with Vicky; he very nearly reaches Low’s level of political acuity and wit but his drawings are much slighter and his characterisation ...”

“... studies of the subject have appeared since (by historians such as Paul Preston, Raymond Carr and Martin Blinkhorn, to mention three British examples). My memories of Homage to Catalonia were not only of the fine, evocative writing, perhaps Orwell’s best, but of his enthusiasm for the people with whom he had lived and fought. If, for some people of my ...”

“... with him was replaced by friendship with his odd daughter Judith. Hardly recovered, she met Gerald Duckworth, Virginia Woolf’s nemesis, but it was for marriage to Lutyens that she gave up her plans to work at the Oxford Mission among the factory girls of Bethnal Green. Her mother’s disapproval of her choice of an architect of uncertain social ...”

“... All Change, was published in 2013, and she died in January this year, aged ninety. Her stepson Martin Amis advised her to embark on the Cazalet books, when she was hesitating between possibilities. It was good advice – and not only because they brought her solid sales and secured her popularity. The material of the chronicles seems like Howard’s ...”

“... innocent homoeroticism discussed by Paul Fussell in The Great War and Modern Memory (1975) or in Martin Taylor’s less fashionable, less thesis-driven anthology, Lads, republished in 1998. In Taylor’s collection, so often are the poems bad, unaware (Ronald-like?) or puny that the best among them – Gurney’s, Edward Thomas’s, Owen’s – rise from ...”

“... an enthusiastic but erratic driver who had recently caused an accident in which her married lover Gerald O’Donovan was badly injured, careered around in her ambulance with the potential for doing more harm than good. The comedy of it was caught with cruel economy by Waugh in the opening of Officers and Gentlemen. It is a scene Feigel might have quoted at ...”

“... a pity that James, who can talk with such trenchancy and sense about everything from Mandelstam to Martin Amis, makes such a fool of himself (and of us) when he touches on the literature of his birthplace. His recent overview of Australian poetry in the Times Literary Supplement shows him at his worst – uninformed and wallowing. Even when he affects to ...”

“... their best to isolate him from the wider Confederate war effort. There were notable successes. Gerald Ford restored Lee’s American citizenship in 1975; as governor of Arkansas, Bill Clinton joined other Southern politicians in merging the state holidays for Lee and Martin Luther King Jr. In the last five ...”

“... mores is compounded when he takes the son of a gangster for a lover. Helen had met Claude through Gerald, her landlord, partially crippled after a garden hose was forced into his rectum as punishment for his violations of Cajun propriety – and his only offence had been to write poetry about life on the bayou. Helen’s exposure to such violence makes her ...”

“... little credibility amongst scholars, and which was authoritatively disposed of in a major essay by Martin Broszat, one of many current historians whom Dawidowicz implicitly belittles.In all these ways the discussion of the literature is selective, impressionistic and extremely unreliable. It encourages little confidence in the author’s judgment. She descends ...”

“... to pouring hundreds of billions of dollars towards Lockheed, Boeing, Rockwell, General Dynamics, Martin Marietta and so on. Even though there’s no money to pay for it. Even though this means a huge budget deficit, means cutting back on education and social spending, means borrowing abroad, means becoming a debtor nation, means the collapse of the ...”

“... undoes all hope with a brutal sentence of his own: ‘April came, May came, and then his son Martin was drowned in a boating accident, on a lake, in a park.’ The story ends with Martin’s funeral and Dan’s return to prison.Coppard liked to say that his stories had little to do with him (‘There is no stupider ...”

“... as one big revolutionary cocktail party, with people like Oliver Tambo, W.E.B. Du Bois and Martin Luther King in attendance. Accra quickly became a magnet for liberation movements across the continent, but it also attracted spies, war criminals and corrupt businessmen. Malcolm X remembered sitting in a hotel dining room there, listening to Americans ...”

“... Cathedral, Londonderry, of Gráinne, daughter of Northern Ireland’s Education Minister Martin McGuinness (not yet knighted for his varied public services, but it’s early days), and Sean ‘Harpie’ Hargan, the Derry football hero. The TV wasn’t there, we thought wistfully, to cover us, or the long-running story that had brought us back to ...”