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“... Life is too short to read Philip Larkin’s juvenilia. Reading ‘Trouble at Willow Gables’ and ‘Michaelmas Term at St Brides’ is up there with stuffing mushrooms: there is a part of me which, as I read – or stuff – has precognition of the moment of my death and the very last conscious thought, which is the blinding awareness of the precious hours wasted on Larkin’s schoolgirl stories or mushrooms when I might have done something more positive with them such as sleeping or filing my nails ...”

“... too, helping him shake his dependence on drugs, while opening his ears to Eastern scales. Before Philip Glass worked with Shankar on a film score in 1965, he had been churning out unremarkable pastiches of French neoclassicism fused with folksy Americana; discovering the rhythmic loops of Indian music kickstarted his first pieces of minimalism. A generation ...”

“... were a hangdog-looking pair as they rode into Liphook on that sunny morning in May. One was short and weedy, with bony shanks and a hungry countenance, the other was a little taller and a deal bulkier, but bloated of face and generally flabby. They were dressed in a soiled and tawdry imitation of their betters, and each looked every inch the ...”

“... four by four grids, accommodating sixteen signs. With these grids, Champerret was able to write short poems, originating from a single sign, as well as longer narratives.One of the letters in the crate suggests that he wrote a document, now lost, explaining his work. The letter is from the director of the Musée de l’Homme, Paul Rivet, and is dated June ...”

“... included A. Alvarez and Ted Hughes, along with Daniel Weissbort) to look for, and claim to find, a short cut. Philip Larkin’s art, not to speak of Basil Bunting’s or Norman MacCaig’s, was too intricate for them to master. There must be a simpler way! And, brilliantly, they found that there was indeed one such simpler ...”

“... to take a look at them, nonetheless, for we now have this account of the man by his brother, Philip Snow. ‘Brothers seldom write about each other,’ as the publisher says, and one may think that in general they are wise not to do so. C. P. Snow, however, knew that Philip would write this book ‘and welcomed it; his ...”

“... from the start’. Plutarch’s account does not always bear out his own thesis, however. It is short and elliptical compared to his other Lives, and in its later chapters raises the disquieting possibility that some of Demosthenes’ crucial policy decisions were bought with bribes. The layers of rhetorical spin are only one of the problems for a modern ...”

“... heart, though he remained conscious enough to beg his friend to shoot him again. Fallada, who was short-sighted, fired three more bullets: one for Necker, two for himself. The first entered his lung, the other narrowly missed his heart. Stumbling back down the path to Rudolstadt, he was found by a forester who took him to hospital. His mother’s first ...”

“... March this year he had granted a staggering 439 urgent questions, each requiring an appearance, at short notice, by a minister at the dispatch box. This compares with the handful granted by his predecessors. No wonder he is cordially loathed by the government, or that he has earned the grudging respect of backbenchers. Another advance has been the rise of the ...”

“... leaders had bitterly criticised the Pershing II missiles stationed in West Germany because of the short time it would take them to hit the Soviet homeland and to destroy some of their command centres. Consequently, they threatened to launch their own missiles ‘on warning’ of an attack. Now the threat will be lessened and Soviet leaders may be given more ...”

“... generals, the soldiers and the civilians. This is accompanied by maps, chronologies, glossaries, short biographies and ‘special features’, photographs and diagrams, which make it also a work of reference. This approach has many virtues. It strikes a good balance between broad analysis and particular conditions, and in examining all belligerent countries ...”

“... Philip Roth likes, or has liked, to describe himself as a ‘suppositional’ novelist. Much of his writing practice, he has said, takes off from a ‘what if?’ What if Franz Kafka had made it to America and there lived on to become a New Jersey schoolmaster? What if Anne Frank had survived and found out about the publication of her diary from a chance reading of Time magazine? What if a man could actually become a breast? What if a decent, shamefaced Jewish boy were to extol the joys of masturbation? And what if we, Roth’s readers, could join in and ask, for instance, what if an earnest young Jewish novelist of the 1950s were to find himself unfairly chastised for his disloyalty to Jews? And what if this same novelist decided to respond by handing his chastisers something they could really, and fairly, get to work on? What if he were to zap them with Portnoy’s Complaint and proceed to sell half a million copies of said horror to the Gentiles? And what if he were then to find himself outlawed and reviled, not just by tribal religious types but even by wise, novel-reading intellectuals? What if one of these intellectuals were to call Portnoy ‘the book of which all anti-semites have been dreaming?’ And what if yet another were to dismiss this earnest young Jewish novelist of the 1950s as a mere pedlar of cheap gags? ‘The cruellest thing anybody can do to Portnoy’s Complaint is to read it twice,’ said Irving Howe – and this was just about the cruellest thing he could do to Philip Roth ...”

“... anything like me, you will find yourself having to fight off a sort of sinking feeling as the new Philip Roth comes thudding into your life. What If A Lookalike Stranger Stole Your Name, Usurped Your Biography, And Went Around The World Pretending To Be You? the jacket flap blares: oh God help us, here we go again. You know there will be a lot of paranoid ...”

“... the cycle the iron ring tradition was intended to break. Still, we see the same mistakes, the same short cuts, the same temptations, the same disasters, repeating over time. The deadly collapse of the Dee Bridge in 1847, which dropped a train into the river, can be traced to the use of an ornamental filigree cast into the iron beams – a lesson that had gone ...”

“... his major task. As for Elliott’s studies of the court and palaces of the Count-Duke’s master, Philip IV, and of the revolt of the Catalans against their joint regime, they complement rather than compete with the book now under review. There are two obvious reasons for this neglect of a major Spanish statesman. The first is that he failed, while his rival ...”