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“... with acuity on Madison and Jefferson and on Jack Ruby (the assassin of Kennedy’s assassin) and Richard Nixon. He is the closest thing the New World has to a Chesterton or a Burke. Who better to reflect on the relationship of sin and power, of eros and daring, of charisma and catastrophe, than an American pilgrim whose journey has taken him from William ...”

“... idea. Although the political criminal imprisoned for an idea, like the common criminal suffers and burns because of sensual deprivation, he burns from his idea as well. Yet the political prisoner has an advantage, however, doubly inflamed. While burning for or in an idea neither banishes nor mitigates other passions, it ...”

“... when she saw Louis XVI being taken to his trial. This suspicion of tears in high places still burns hot and strong. After George Osborne wept at the funeral of Margaret Thatcher, he was cross-questioned at some length on the Today programme by John Humphrys, who, as Dixon points out, seemed unable to credit that a grown man could genuinely grieve for his ...”

“... when Foe was published, one reviewer accused him of indulging in ‘postmodern games while Soweto burns’. Everett has said that his second novel, Walk Me to the Distance (1985), which never explicitly states the ethnicity of the central character, was criticised for ‘avoiding the hard stuff’, while Frenzy (1997), about Dionysus, was rejected for lacking ...”

“... ascribed jokes and smart sayings to well-known figures such as the poet John Skelton or the fool Richard Tarleton. Jest-book-style anecdotes were often transcribed alongside more serious quotations in manuscript notebooks compiled by individual readers. So in 1601, the lawyer John Manningham recorded in what’s usually called his ‘diary’ (though really ...”

“... have injected an element of the energy which makes attractive fictional monsters as disparate as Richard III and John Self. Chicago Loop (terrific title) is another book that has a cold, clear surface and a lurking nastiness underneath. Its central character, Parker Jagoda (terrific name), is a 37-year old architect-turned-developer who, unknown to his ...”

“... producer. He is a reporter who became a full-time writer of books: Homicide (1991) and, with Ed Burns, The Corner (1997), both of which were turned into successful TV series. Both concern drugs and death in Baltimore; Simon has said that ‘what drugs have not destroyed, the war on them has.’ The Wire is different, though: more ambitious, more ...”

“... suntanned heads, Their ancient arms Outstretched, belong to you. Although your head still burns Your hands remember me. There is an echo of Yeats (impossible to hear ‘ancient’ without it), quite a bit of ‘Waking in the Blue’ in the humorous commingling of health and sickness, but the thing doesn’t seem literary at all: the tenderness and ...”

“... that the seventh erotic encounter between Mellors and Lady Chatterley, where the gamekeeper ‘burns out the shame in her’, contains an act of buggery. Sparrow’s line is not – as the conventional Right might have hoped – that this makes the book obscene: indeed, he offers no opinion on the legal implications. His intention is both more distant and ...”

“... are not immune: the Rhode of 3.19 becomes ‘Rosy’. Horace is for today, not of today: ‘it burns me up’, ‘rattles on about’, ‘beauty queen’, ‘in charge of operations’, ‘heart-throb’, ‘snap of my fingers’, ‘sex god’ and ‘sex appeal’ are the indefensible pinchbeck of modernity, invariably out of place, and wisely avoided by ...”

“... by SB, possibly adopting a disingenuous tabloid typo, as ‘Lieback’) suffered third-degree burns to her groin and legs, requiring skin grafts and eight days in hospital. Initially she sought from McDonald’s her medical expenses and the earnings lost by her daughter in taking care of her, a maximum of $15,000. She went to a lawyer when McDonald’s ...”

“... two lovers exchanging ‘hands legs and fates’ in the winter time in the Revolution. The candle burns when Zhivago writes his poems, the emblem and essence of what lives and matters. Lara is presumably in bed and asleep. Put like that, it sounds a piece of bathos and this is the paradox of an art like Pasternak’s, which is at once totally popular and ...”

“... What could possibly be down there? Two new fish have risen to this bait. Philip Kitcher and Richard Schacht’s Finding an Ending proceeds from their conviction that ‘Wagner’s libretto, ponderous and mannered though it may sometimes seem (and be), is charged with life and significance.’ They therefore propose ‘to probe its philosophical and ...”

“... on at least one military recruitment broadside during the Napoleonic Wars, but they are spoken by Richard the Lionheart’s illegitimate son over the usurping John’s poisoned corpse. Even without the undercutting produced by a knowledge of its dramatic context, the play’s final couplet contains a big ‘if’: ‘Naught shall make us rue/If England to ...”

“... defying body and convention to ‘soar like an eagle’ in the way of the blessed inebriate in Richard Thompson’s song ‘God Loves a Drunk’ (‘His shouts and his curses they are just hymns and praises/To kick-start his mind now and then’)? Timothy Neat writes not in order to leave his late friend in a heap on the floor, least of all the floor of ...”