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“... of freedom under the communists. It is also true that Teilhard de Chardin is a rather easier read than Dobzhansky and that Husserl, Lyotard and Lévi-Strauss have had the advantage of a good introduction, represented as they are by influential and eloquent Czech followers. Among 67 non-fiction books released in Prague and recently listed in a literary ...”

“... into their own dreams and vanities: their great hearts were not on display. Did Wittgenstein read P.G. Wodehouse? Probably not, but had he done so he might have got on with him very well, as he did with the conventions of early cinema. With such things you knew where you were, and a philosopher likes that: Gilbert Ryle, so it is said, thought ...”

“... studying in the United States, he had been told, by his father, his teachers, by the books he read, that Oxford for the British was ‘like the Hardwar of the Hindus, the Mecca of the Muslims, the Golden Temple of the Sikhs’. To be an Oxford man was to enjoy a ‘state of being’ akin to the sublime. He also learned that, of all the Oxford ...”

“... turn one of them off. It’s a good service, a model, with none of the speakers – his two sons, Richard Eyre and Robert Bathurst – outstaying their welcome and Ben vividly recalled.Bathurst is particularly good, reading a Betjeman poem about golf, following it up with a very funny (and almost better) poem in parody by Ben himself. Since I know him chiefly ...”

“... colleagues, inquiring which of these much discussed books of the day they and their spouses had read. The response was grim and philistine. Mann concludes: ‘interest in, and readership of, the modern literary novel is restricted to a very small minority of the population who are lucky to have supplies provided for them by a publicly financed ...”

“... of authorial posturing common in the 18th century and earlier, it comes as a kind of relief to read contemporary accounts of Sterne’s fame, including those deliriously provided in his own surviving letters. Sterne was hardly the first vain author, but he was perhaps the first major English writer who declined to play the old games of gentlemanly ...”

“... films were Great Expectations and Kind Hearts and Coronets. Having impressed the composer Richard Rodgers (Rodgers and Hammerstein) in New York, she was invited to star in The King and I and did so at Drury Lane. Profumo did not immediately gain office when Churchill won the 1951 election, but a year later he became parliamentary undersecretary at the ...”

“... quoted of the French maîtres penseurs, he became, in the space of about twenty years, the least read and the least analysed. His courageous positions on Algeria and Vietnam were forgotten. So were his work on behalf of the oppressed, his gutsy appearance as a Maoist radical during the 1968 student demonstrations in Paris, as well as his extraordinary range ...”

“... combined, and John Wayne was in one of them. Orange County is in Southern California, home of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, of Hollywood, Disneyland and John Wayne. Nixon would have lost his home state and the White House in 1968 without his Southern California support. At the 1984 Republican Convention, Reagan, our second Southern California ...”

“... grand head-on, Neoclassical façades for simple reproduction (see, for example, the magnificent Richard Pare collection, Photography and Architecture 1839-1939)? Photography would then be co-operating in the actual construction of the newer buildings, angling into dimensions of built space that our ordinary human bodies have little daily commerce ...”

“... encounters but zero orgasms. Adèle, an attractive Parisian woman in her thirties, with a husband, Richard, a child and a desultory job as a journalist, has what the DSM-5 would describe as a hypersexual disorder, that is, if sex addiction weren’t such a controversial diagnosis that the DSM-5 clinicians decided not to include it. ‘Adèle has been ...”

“... her date of birth (1879 – she lopped a few years off her age) and identified her father as Richard T. Greener, a prominent civil rights activist who was also the first Black student to receive a bachelor’s degree from Harvard. (His waterlogged diploma, discovered in an attic in 2009, was displayed at the exhibition.) Heidi Ardizzone’s biography of ...”

“... to his own ‘transfixions’. And yet what feels artificial on the page may be oddly natural when read aloud. (Agee said that the whole book should be read aloud.) The idea of a rigorous accounting, as if to ratify an oral history that these people cannot speak themselves, is among his strongest motives. So one comes to ...”

“... own present inability, aged 50, to imagine what it is like to be 50. I’ve heard a lot about it, read plenty, seen numbers of 50-year-olds, both depicted and in real life, but that seems to be no help at all. This isn’t surprising. The 50 that I seek to understand is the same 50 I wondered about as a child, it has nothing much to do with having lived for ...”

“... for many years: it described the wrong kind of heroism.* Starving Leningraders, she wrote, read War and Peace for encouragement: Tolstoy’s characters were the best measure they could find for their own extraordinary feats of survival. Russian historians estimate that 27 million Soviet citizens died in the Great Patriotic War between 1941 and 1945 ...”