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“... dust-jacket to Forty Stories mentions Pynchon and Beckett, but this is the world of Thurber and Charles Addams. Barthelme’s more serious intentions were made clear from the start. In ‘Marie, Marie, hold on tight’ (a story not to be found here but in his first book Come back, Dr Caligari) three protestors picket a New York church, in order to ...”

“... under the US system. I only think he is too confident of having demonstrated this. In reply to Charles Beitz’s criticism of the purely procedural interpretation of equal respect as implausibly narrow, he says: It is because we disagree about what counts as a substantively respectful outcome that we need a decision-procedure; in this context, folding ...”

“... vices: an attachment to the idea that ‘logic is the essence of philosophy’ and thus to the hope that results within logic are going to have decisive philosophical importance. He makes much play with the Loewenheim-Skolem theorem – ‘a satisfiable first-order theory (in a countable language) has a countable model’ – as if this somehow underwrote ...”

“... afflictions: her brother’s epilepsy, the death by drowning of a sister, like Browning’s Evelyn Hope ‘sixteen years old when she died’. Life and literature became inextricably tangled for the young girl in a quiet province. Frame is skilled at describing the almost tactile presence of words for the child and adolescent: the physical shock when she ...”

“... the actor who played Pete Dean in EastEnders was living with a woman who had once dated Prince Charles. The most interesting aspect of Tunstall’s survey, indeed, is the attention he draws to the relationship with television as the biggest single shift in newspaper culture since he conducted a similar study in 1968, just before Rupert Murdoch’s arrival ...”

“... who battened on the spa trade spread the notion that self-treatment held out as little hope of salvation as saying one’s prayers at home and never going to church. The ritual and the socialising, along with the change of climate and scenery, were part of the cure, if not all of it, as even the doctors sometimes admitted. For about twenty years ...”

“... lament the fact that Netanyahu has moved Israel away from its preordained, conciliatory course, or hope that ‘the left’ might steer it back. There is no left in Israel aside from a few heroic groupuscules. Netanyahu’s Israel – illiberal, exclusionary, racist – is now the political centre. I used​ to call myself a non-Zionist, rather than an ...”

“... of that stance it is hard to see them behaving differently. In the end, the best they can hope for is incompetence. Governments eventually accumulate errors, and this government is no exception. Sooner or later the electorate will weary of it, largely on non-ideological grounds. But it might well be later rather than sooner. The second problem facing ...”

“... As a result ‘going postal’ came to be used as a synonym for a berserk outburst of violence. Charles Bukowski’s butch, squalid autobiographical novel Post Office (1971) gives some idea of how this might have come about: ‘It was 12 hours a night, plus supervisors, plus clerks, plus the fact that you could hardly breathe in that pack of flesh, plus ...”

“... on HMS Namur, a 74-gun man-of-war. The vessel’s captain was Jane Austen’s younger brother, Charles (there are no references to Douglas in the Austen family correspondence). He entered the Royal Navy not as a cabin-boy but as officer material, and was (probably) instructed in reading, writing and seamanship by the ship’s schoolteachers. He ...”

“... to listen, to join in the debates in this suddenly transformed Scotland, where a turbid flood of hope and doubt, of new-found collective confidence and old prejudices, was running towards September. In Caithness, we heard the news that fire had destroyed Glasgow School of Art and the grove-like library which was ...”

“... passions inflamed: Laplace was French and Adams English. Parity was restored when the Frenchman Charles Delaunay showed that Laplace’s calculation did indeed account for half the effect and that tidal friction could account for the rest. The Moon raises tides on the oceans directly below it. As the Earth rotates, it drags these tidal bulges with it, so ...”

“... in a dirt and paint-encrusted green baize coat with a tired old wig. But a bequest was the best hope for the two women, whose other male relatives had proven unreliable. Margaret’s brother, John, apprenticed to a Dublin lawyer, had already squandered the family property. Du Preez and Dronfield interpret the motivation behind Bulkley’s decision to take ...”

“... Shock and horror swept through Allied and neutral nations alike. In New York City, the composer Charles Ives observed that passengers waiting for the ‘El’ train spontaneously began to sing the Gospel song ‘In the Sweet By and By’, whose refrain promised that the drowned would one day be saved: In the sweet by and by We shall meet on that beautiful ...”

“... but talk on these lines can easily grow unreal and rather clammy. What most people actually hope for is that Biden will somehow talk down the violent extremes that seem on the verge of an open clash. Popular worries about the election led to a drastic spike in gun purchases. ‘The country,’ Biden said in a campaign speech in Gettysburg, ‘is in a ...”