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“... such remarkable properties as that of spin without mass, how can it also be really composed of green grass and round tables? Five of the 12 essayists – Michael Dummett, P.F. Strawson, David Pears, D.M. Armstrong and Charles Taylor – are concerned with these or with closely related questions. Collectively – taken together with those earlier writings ...”

“... curious about how we got where we are. It could also save the Government the expense of another Green Paper – although it is unlikely that they will find Halsey’s analysis congenial. Anyone reading him must be sceptical about the current round of reforms, based as they are on blind faith in the virtues of homogenisation and command decision. As a first ...”

“... of what looks like a lava-flow, a bubbling eruption of red and yellow on a background of blue and green). The great roar and hiss of publicity surrounding the book will soon subside – sufficient unto the day the newspaper thereof. But the shockwaves emanating from the poems themselves will be felt for some time. The poems in Birthday Letters are ostensibly ...”

“... to convey this understanding of history: even controversial figures like the rapacious conqueror Robert Clive were enrolled in the pantheon of imperial greatness. The statue of the Bristol slave trader Edward Colston, toppled last year, was put up in 1895, though he died in 1721. But the strategy was a failure: more people learned about Colston in the 24 ...”

“... be the best Irish poet since Yeats, which arose from rather casual remarks by the power-crazed Robert Lowell and the craze-powered Clive James, who seemed to have forgotten both MacNeice and Kavanagh. In the meantime, Heaney is a very good poet indeed – which is enough to be going on with.Heaney’s version of the Middle Irish Romance Buile Suibhne ...”

“... introducing one of the toughest vaccine passport regimes in response to Covid: a ‘super green’ pass, signalling double vaccination, is required in most public places. People aged over fifty have to be fully vaccinated in order to work, as do most government employees.One success of the anti-vax movement is that we now spend so much time talking ...”

“... the ‘Research and Development’ arm of American fiction – the tradition of Thomas Pynchon, Robert Coover, William Gaddis and Don DeLillo. That might not sound hard if you think of R&D as a matter of surface effects: pop-cultural references, metafictional gestures, glazed irony and so on. But for Moody (b.1961), as for Jonathan Franzen (b.1959) and ...”

“... can, it seems, make excellent translations on any principle at all, free or literal or in between. Robert Lowell was cruelly and unjustly pilloried by Nabokov for his wonderful ‘imitations’ of Rimbaud, Rilke and others. But then Nabokov’s literal version of Eugene Onegin has all kinds of virtues, and is itself routinely pilloried by almost everyone who ...”

“... the great mining films of the early 1940s (Carol Reed’s The Stars Look Down, John Ford’s How Green Was My Valley). Bernard soon leaves the mineshafts behind. His main interest lies in the ways in which the advent of the elevator transformed the design, construction and experience of high-rise buildings, and thus of modern urban life in general (the focus ...”

“... of Mackintosh came with the publication in 1968 of a study by the Canadian-born architect Robert Macleod, who concluded that he was ‘a last and remote efflorescence of a vital British tradition which reached back to Pugin … With his pursuit of the “modern”, his love of the old, and his obsessive individuality, he was one of the last and one of ...”

“... recruiting other proxies, such as Israel and Iraq, though with little success. Giving Israel the green light to destroy the PLO led to the Lebanon debacle in 1982. Cynically supporting Saddam Hussein in his war of aggression against the mullahs in Tehran led to pointless slaughter. Each of these episodes opened a door through which US forces entered the ...”

“... of concrete detail, often signalled by parentheses and the rule of three: ‘festive pastels (mint green, rancho pink, milky desert blue)’, ‘prescription medications (Roitman, Andrea, alprazolam .25 mg)’. And there’s the odd misfiring poeticism (‘Light from the street flew in black bands across the floor’). Yet a lot of the writing is formidably ...”

“... Charles Dickens, Henry James, Bram Stoker, Ulysses S. Grant, Toulouse-Lautrec, Lillie Langtry, Robert Mitchum and Jean Cocteau were also on the books. Some of their accounts are closed, crossed out with lines of red ink and marked ‘Dead’. Grand Duke Sergei of Russia’s reads ‘Assassinated’. A ‘Sundry Debtors’ list from 1909-41 fills a hundred ...”

“... at worst a particularly dodgy branch of alternative medicine or new age bunk: sustainabulous, green, responsible, liminal, wellness, community, performative, holistic, participatory, community (again). Mind mange? Ghosts in the infrastructure? Boney’s or Bogey’s or the Bears’ advance through the gaps between the paving stones? Architecture will get ...”

“... Living Mountain, in an edition called The Grampian Quartet. But it took the apostolic arrival of Robert Macfarlane, who proclaimed her works in The Old Ways and in an introduction to the 2011 edition of The Living Mountain, to turn Shepherd into a publishing sensation. It’s a chippy Aberdonian thing to say, but I notice that this validation had to come ...”