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“... way in which they are compelled to fulfil their ‘evil fortunes’. ‘Evil fortunes’ is not a straight translation of Dante’s ‘sad pass’, nor does ‘accursed’ convey the complex, almost benign understanding in Dante’s line about the book the lovers were reading when they fell: Galeotto fu’l libro e chi lo scrisse. A work of gallantry and ...”

“... With no more murmurs in the Liberal ranks In Labour’s there is total consternation. If Michael Foot tore out his hair in hanks He could not look more prone to perturbation. The right wing loudly calls the left wing cranks And no one stays calm in the altercation Except for Tony Benn, who sucks contentedly On his prop pipe and stares ahead ...”

“... specific to period and place: the Rev. Henry Rich is described on the first page as coming ‘straight out of Mansfield Park’, and it is a matter for debate whether he succeeds in emerging from that rarefied world. It is partly because Henry Rich’s obsession with Time – which at one point he characterises as moving in our imaginations from left to ...”

“... Parliament, is out of the question. But wait. Anyone who concludes that the Bingham Report is a straight cover-up for the Bank is making a big mistake. Despite its moderate tone and its reluctance to condemn out loud, the report is a long catalogue of carelessness on the part of the Bank, the auditors and the other agencies responsible. Again and ...”

“... biography, based on archival research and extensive interviews, was that of the American Slavists, Michael Holquist and Katerina Clark, which for years circulated in a samizdat translation in the Soviet Union. Nor was this at all surprising: the resolutely non-Marxist Bakhtin (though he was obliged for professional reasons to grind out an occasional article on ...”

“... comparison between these two kinds, the one inert, the other progressive, is made in terms drawn straight from the book on Evolution: Between the first morality and the second there is thus all the distance which separates rest from movement. The first is held to be immutable. If it changes, it at once forgets that it has changed or does not admit to the ...”

“... hearing the word “hypersonics”,’ one official remarked to an industry sponsored conference. Michael Griffin, undersecretary of defence for research and engineering, a hypersonics enthusiast, has spoken of the need for ‘maybe thousands’ of hypersonic weapons. ‘This takes us back to the Cold War,’ he announced cheerfully, ‘where at one point we ...”

“... her to Colm Tóibín, and she did her ‘bottle through the table’ trick, which he put straight into the novel he was writing (The Story of the Night). At the Groucho Club, there would be too much Sancerre with various Britpop loons, a bit of napping under the snooker table, and a lot of drinking with artists who were busy inventing their ...”

“... The American flag was planted, though there was some awkwardness in getting it to stand up straight and to make it look like it was waving in the non-existent lunar wind. (When the Eagle took off back to Earth, the flag fell over.) When they landed, President Nixon phoned long-distance to declare that ‘for every American this has to be the proudest ...”

“... source of conflict or grief?’ On the other, the new energies she has found in loving Harry surge straight back into her work: ‘The need to pay homage to the transitive, the flight, the great soup of being in which we actually live.’ Self-expression,​ desire, a get-out-of-jail-free card to protect against ‘bad consequences’: it isn’t hard to see ...”

“... and easy extrapolation. Belton is not one of them; he is as fastidious, though not so succinct, as Michael Frayn in his play Copenhagen. Heisenberg said in his memoirs that ‘science is rooted in conversations.’ He seemed to open the door, in the friendliest fashion, for the novelist and the playwright. Schrödinger’s formulation was darker: ‘Science is ...”

“... The vote​ for Donald Trump may well have been what Michael Moore called the ‘biggest fuck-you ever recorded in human history’, delivered by the white working class to spite ‘the establishment’. But it isn’t just the size of the fuck-you that matters; it’s also who delivers it. A fuck-you can be sent via satirical parties (Iceland’s Best Party won the election for mayor of Reykjavik; Hungary’s Two-Tailed Dog Party had a hand in sabotaging Viktor Orbán’s recent anti-refugee referendum), or subversive parties (the Pirates), or grassroots movements turned parties (Podemos ...”

“... study, means that there is no possibility of creating a ‘fairy taxonomy’, which would set straight all the stories, beliefs and motifs, and reconstruct a long lost original mythology (as Jacob Grimm attempted to do for the Germanic world in his Deutsche Mythologie of 1835). The desire for one was certainly there. Beating Grimm very slightly to the ...”

“... with windows onto 53rd Street orients visitors in relation to the city. As before, we can head straight after we enter, and turn right towards the Sculpture Garden, up to the vast atrium, and on to the galleries of the 2004 extension above, which is where most of the temporary shows will now be held. Or we can turn immediately left, towards the new Geffen ...”

“... Leiden until they discovered that Dutch cities weren’t best suited for keeping teenagers on the straight and narrow; next, they boarded a rackety wine ship, the Mayflower, and sailed off into the Atlantic. Their destination was Virginia, which after a rough start was now a flourishing colony. Planters there exported tobacco, and in 1619 convened the first ...”