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“... be very high. So, predictably enough, it has been with the United Nations. Readers approaching James Traub’s and Stanley Meisler’s books thus have reason to expect the worst. In some ways the expectation is amply fulfilled, but in others the two books – each by a journalist – cast more light on the UN than is normally allowed to fall on it. The ...”

“...  Henry James​ ’s novel The Princess Casamassima, which dramatises the world of stray revolutionaries in London in the 1880s, depends on energy coming from opposites. The novel’s protagonist, Hyacinth Robinson, appreciates beauty and feels excluded from the world of privilege around him. He lives an interior life ...”

“... theoretical edge of human thought. Regis can even explain the quality of an excitement like this. James Gleick’s Chaos tells an exhilarating tale. It starts a quarter of a century ago with work on weather forecasting by Edward Lorenz and finishes with an account of the penetration of ‘chaos’ research into sciences as ...”

“... found everywhere in American writing, from Cooper to Emerson, from Twain to Whitman, and Henry James, from Dreiser to Willa Cather and on to Mailer. Lawrence’s two Englishwomen, Lou Witt and her acerbic mother, are to be found at the end of the story in the deserts of New Mexico, where the younger woman, like the New England woman who occupied the ranch ...”

“... its provenance’, but never quite decides what it does seek to be. Judicious selections from Edward Taylor and Anne Bradstreet extend the anthology’s reach beyond what Ricks terms ‘our precious stones from Land’s End to John o’Groats, leave alone the emerald of Ireland’. On the other hand, the editorial policy excludes ‘the British Empire or ...”

“... less likely than Faulkner’s to be snatched into a metaphysical empyrean. She doesn’t, as Henry James would say, ‘cultivate the high pitch and beat the big drum’. What interests her is not so much their existential dilemmas as their physical and moral landscape, the enclosing objects, in which she allows herself virtually to disappear: their domestic ...”

“... is said, though I have never seen any public announcement, to have fallen on Robert Rhodes James. If so, it is an excellent decision. Meanwhile Mr David Carlton has produced a scholarly, well-written work of some five hundred pages. The author admits very fairly that it is in the nature of an interim verdict since the official records of the ...”

“... further in a sepulchral world of its own. Even then, the couple’s only way was probably out: an Edward VIII-plus solution, with its terminal implications for the future of the institution. After September, can there be any doubt at all? There are still trusties like Vernon Bogdanor and Clive James who feel that ...”

“... River (1941), described by his secretary as ‘so unlike him, so introspective’, the dying Sir Edward Leithen spends his last days saving indigenous Canadians in the name of ‘the brotherhood of all men, white and red and brown’. The Island of Sheep (1936) proposes a similar brotherhood between the angry African tribesmen who save the day in the ...”

“... prerogative rights; and it would give rise to ‘republican’ classics in the writings of Milton, James Harrington and Algernon Sidney. Hobbes’s three major works of political philosophy, The Elements of Law, De Cive and Leviathan, were designed, Skinner tells us, in direct opposition to parliamentary and radical writers. As the conflict between Parliament ...”

“... respect rather than disposable celebrity. She has contributed to some of the better documentaries: James Ellroy, Anita Ekberg, Eric Sykes, watershed BBC2, air-hostesses and desert roads, midnight fodder on Channel 4, the real lost memories. She likes to use old film, degraded archive footage, and to have it reshot on tape, fed into her slim box of ...”

“... to J. Edgar Hoover, [Harry] Cohn has the finest surveillance system in the USA. The director Edward Dmytrk probably got it right when he refused to give names and honourably served his prison time and then – surprise! – became employable again by testifying against his former comrades. Way to go, Eddie. Clancy’s narrative voice is first-person ...”

“... morning: blue sky, bare trees, every detail plain.4 March. I am rereading (or reading properly) James Stourton’s book on Kenneth Clark. I hadn’t realised how apposite for these days is Yeats’s quite hackneyed ‘Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;/Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world/ … The best lack all conviction, while the worst/Are full ...”

“... New styles of architecture, new styles of advertising, also signalled the change of heart. Edward Bernays, Freud’s nephew, became the presiding genius of Madison Avenue; he made cigarette advertising sexy, and persuaded women to smoke Lucky Strikes. The age of euphemism gave way to the age of dysphemism; sex, suppressed by the matriarchs, came out ...”

“... Wall is Robin Birley, not Robert; William III’s historiographer was Thomas Rymer, not Edward; it was in the ruins of the Capitol, not the Colosseum, that Gibbon conceived the idea of the Decline and Fall; and Rothesay is not an island. It would be wrong, however, to allow pedantic irritation to mar one’s enjoyment of this wonderful compendium of ...”