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“... made of it than either the waters or their meeting deserve.’ This is the English travel writer John Barrow writing of the Vale of Avoca in 1835. Like him, I find it hard to decide on the register of the phrase, so lyrical as a song title, so grandiloquent as a synonym for ‘confluence’; unlike Barrow, I find these meetings fascinating, but I don’t ...”

“... postwar England. The manuscript had been rejected by several more literal-minded publishers before John Lehmann, the editor of New Writing, took it on at the recommendation of his assistant, Julia Strachey, Lytton Strachey’s niece. So it was as a literary work, with a lingering glow of Bloomsbury behind it, that David’s ...”

“... controversy provoked at home by the Indian Mutiny seven years earlier had been about Charles John Canning’s attempts as governor-general to rein back the brutality of the military reprisals. A slave revolt in Jamaica in 1831, seven years before formal emancipation, had been visited with hundreds of executions, albeit after some form of trial, without ...”

“... novel, Joy in the Morning. I continued plugging away at this for exactly two months, when they took us all off in a van to internment. After a few weeks spent in prisons, barracks etc we were dumped down at the lunatic asylum at Tost in Upper Silesia, where it was possible to resume writing and I started a new novel called Money in the Bank ... I had to ...”

“... to Warsaw as a young man Singer promised his father ‘that I would conduct myself as a Jew.’ He took a mistress, admittedly a Jewish one, twice as old as himself, and adopted all sorts of goy ways. Polish girls were amused by him and admired his red hair and blue eyes. Even the army sergeants were fairly good-natured when he had to present himself as a ...”

“... I were really tired of you I wouldn’t tell you.’    ‘Then why do you tell me?’ I took it up, hungering for something positive, however small.    ‘I don’t always say what I think,’ was the answer. We walked on.    ‘We are leaving in any case,’ she said. It is deceptively simple, but oddly effective in conveying the fact ...”

“... is ultimately what matters, and how rare it is for a critic to admit this. Ida, incidentally, I took at first to be a friend of the family, but she turned out to be a devout Catholic German – Ida Frederike Görres – whose diaries and letters of the Fifties, Broken Lights, were published by Burns and Oates. Toynbee disliked her inbred Catholicism but ...”

“... career, he wasn’t a team player.’ All the same, he still walks the corridors of power: ‘He took on such assignments as pleased the operator in him, the behind-the-scenes Teddy Regler: in the Persian Gulf, with a Japanese whiskey firm looking for a South American market, with the Italian police tracking terrorists. None of these activities compromised ...”

“... and commoditised society, and prepared the nation for the great leap forward that the economy took in the 1780s. The consequences of this transformation were everywhere to be seen. Greater prosperity for nearly all classes, albeit unevenly distributed, led to the production and purchase of more consumer goods, to more entertainment and recreation, and to ...”

“... That project failed, because it could only be used between humans, about topics that humans took an interest in: now, with computers to commune with, just such languages have had to be devised. Is that how Turing’s scientist must talk and think, totally impervious to poetry, puns or passion? Formal computer languages certainly affect our attitude to ...”

“... of bread would undergo a fission chain reaction of devastating power. Historical determinism then took him to Los Alamos – and into the domain of these other books. There they all were, some of the best academic physicists in the world, plonked down in a mushrooming encampment in the wilds of New Mexico and told to make an atom bomb. The recollections of ...”

“... by the scholastic theologians who followed Abelard, and became a dogma with the humanists who took over from them in the Renaissance. The reformed Abelard may figure as the author, in the West, of the idea that Christianity is a spiritual, not a social, faith and religion. To that degree he was out-Bernarding St Bernard and out-Hildebranding the Gregorian ...”

“... restored to all its members, would such symptoms of social disease be eradicated. Emile Durkheim took account of neither Peuchet nor Marx in his celebrated Suicide of 1897, a chilly work which claimed to document ‘social facts’ without needing to recount the feelings of the individuals concerned. He broke suicides down into ‘egotistic’ and ...”

“... the social changes that inaugurated his decline. His love objects were not usually girls, though John Betjeman, sighing over thighs, caught the authentic tone of enraptured and impotent yearning. Morton Cohen is, however, at pains to rescue Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (‘Lewis Carroll’) from this galère, and to present him as a well-rounded, sociable ...”

“... for the godly in England. In 1629 he became active in the Massachusetts Bay Company headed by John Winthrop, a Suffolk man. A year later Pynchon and his family boarded the Ambrose, one of Winthrop’s fleet of four ships that sailed for the New World, where there was known to be land for the taking. Pynchon settled seven miles south of Boston, near ...”