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“... ex-national servicemen to be shocked when they reread their diaries and letters. He tells us that Paul Foot (Hugh Foot’s son) found it painful to read the diary he kept at the time of Suez; and he suggests that most conscripts who expressed political opinions merely adopted those of their parents. That was certainly true of me. I went to Jamaica with the ...”

“... the Trianon Treaty. Initially interested in engineering (the family business was forestry and saw-mills), he began to consider architecture after coming across Hermann Muthesius’s Das Englische Haus (1904-05): English domestic architecture as observed by the German cultural attaché in London from 1896 onwards. In Muthesius’s pages, Arts and Crafts ...”

“... had a crush. When he was 25 he had what he called ‘that central experience of my heart’ with Paul Ehrenberg, a student painter and violinist at the Munich Art Academy who more than forty years later became Rudi Schwerdtfeger in Doctor Faustus. Even the boy in Death in Venice was based on a real boy. Katia Mann remembered being on holiday in Venice with ...”

“... of Italy’s transport infrastructure encouraged the creation of more self-sufficient steel mini-mills. Britain’s relative decline has been the subject of hundreds if not thousands of books. Perhaps it should be no surprise that the analysis here is often both familiar and at first glance deeply depressing. The examples cited of British success range from ...”

“... with toxic exhausts, some of which have been released in the course of carrying timber to pulp mills, paper to printers and journals to readers. Awareness of nature is dependent on complicity in its destruction. Until you understand what is happening, you are not in a position to protest; but by that time you have already consumed rather a lot of the ...”

“... interest to grow – lost some of its power to throw up new combinations and inventions. But the mills were rolling, and the large abstract canvases which became the badge of New York painting went on being produced in moulds which had to a large extent already been formed. De Kooning, says Tom Armstrong, director of the Whitney Museum of American ...”

“... contain nearly a hundred thousand pages of manuscript material. The vast Collected Poems edited by Paul Keegan and published in 2003 presents a poet who insistently ‘o’erflows the measure’, to borrow a phrase from Antony and Cleopatra, veering, rather like Shakespeare’s Antony, between the sublime and the bathetic, the uncannily sure-footed and the ...”

“... production and ugliness – the poem was written in the early Sixties, when the dark satanic mills were still largely in business. His 1974 collection, The Way In, attempts to resolve that conflict, for, unlike John Maydew, Tomlinson moved away from the slag and into the green. The first person singular confidently speaks throughout ‘At Stoke’ and ...”

“... The next morning we set out for the Ulster Folk Museum where there are thatched cottages, scutch mills, mill terraces, churches, flax growing in the grounds of an old manor house at Cultra on the shores of Belfast Lough. I have to deliver an elegy for Ulster Scots in Ballyverdagh National School, one of the institutions that helped to stamp out the ...”

“... Armed Services Committee, is ‘tall and warm – and as tough as a Trident missile’; Cheryl Mills, Clinton’s top State Department aide, is a ‘ball-buster’ and a ‘pit bull’. But Clinton’s hawkishness is a matter of moral and intellectual conviction. In Hard Choices, she tries to construct a coherent rationale for an interventionist foreign ...”

“... tank. But the moment that Sarah Palin stepped up to the mike at the Republican Convention in St Paul, and began talking in her homely, mezzo-soprano, Far Western twang, she showed herself to be incontestably the real thing. Americans, starved of völkisch authenticity in their national politicians, thrilled to her presence on the stage. Forty million people ...”

“... to use military force, up to and including nuclear weapons. Not for nothing did C. Wright Mills coin the term ‘crackpot realists’ to describe the masterminds of the nuclear arms race. And the elasticity of the phrase ‘national interest’ compounds the difficulty: could it be used to justify Nixon and Kissinger’s carpet-bombing of North ...”

“... the Sex Pistols as Johnny Rotten or Sid Vicious, eclipsing the group’s musical muscle: drummer Paul Cook, guitarist Steve Jones and bassist Glen Matlock. (It was Matlock who wrote nearly all the group’s best tunes, only to be pushed out for being a Beatles-loving middle-class namby.) Andrew Loog Oldham, who managed the Rolling Stones, was the crucial ...”

“... attribution to Charlotte’s Belgian teacher, Constantin Héger, is laughable: it’s signed ‘Paul Hegér’ (Paul Emmanuel, a character with strong affinities to Héger, is the love-interest in Villette). The date given is 1850; Charlotte left Brussels in 1844. The accent is in the wrong place: Hegér not Héger. It ...”

“... so often loosely identified as individualism. McGurl offers a few sociological references (Wright Mills, Pine and Gilmore, Thomas Frank), and even a few socio-economic ones (Ulrich Beck, Anthony Giddens). The point is, however, not necessarily to endorse these (many are standard culture critiques), but rather to indicate the direction in which literary theory ...”