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“... Sarah Walker’s name comes up. She is his Achilles’ heel, his dreadful gaffe. The rebarbative champion of political liberties is here discovered on his knees, abasing himself before this ‘worthless’ coquette less than half his age, and then – to compound the blunder – actually publishing his outpourings of sentiment in an anonymous mémoire à ...”

“... men have seen it by.’ But it is all a mistake, as with Emma’s obstinate plans for Harriet in Jane Austen’s novel. Mr Casaubon is no Pascal; his ‘Key to All Mythologies’, to which Dorothea plans to devote her young energies, is a figment of his fussy, elderly brain, an ‘idea’ he once had for a multi-volume work which is simply gathering dust in ...”

“... was fond of a certain, broadly Cots wold vernacular style, but by and large ... [he is] the champion of a sort of Palladianism that stood up well to the 20th century and its turmoil – a calm, still point in a turning world. And it must be some similar classical squint, I think, that sees Clough’s schoolboy discovery and adoration of the ruined ...”

“... Hutchins’s novel need be read solely as displaced autobiography. Like similar forays by Barnes, Jane Bowles or Carson McCullers, Victorine makes its claim on us precisely because it transcends whatever idiosyncratic psychic turmoil it may once have registered. No, Hutchins will never please readers who judge Flaubertian self-effacement essential to literary ...”

“... is made explicit when Taylor invites readers ‘to think of our language as the home of two world champion playwrights, not just one’. Arguing that the relative obscurity into which Middleton fell was a consequence of his never having been collected into one of those memorialising tomes, Taylor would like this edition to be recognised as ‘Middleton’s ...”

“... as for my skating teacher, a means to an end. They would make me the new Sonja Henie the skating champion turned skating movie star. I would be the youngest champion ice skater ever, and she would be the mother of the champion. My mother dreamed of making me into an ice princess, but ...”

“... did, for not wholly unrelated reasons. At the same time, the elevation of Fielding into a greater champion of women than he sometimes really was calls for two cheers rather than three. Smallwood rightly draws attention to Fielding’s promotion of a common contemporary view that women were made inferior by bad educational practice rather than by natural ...”

“... and localist rather than globalist, a believer in higher taxation and higher public spending, a champion of the working class, a sceptic on Europe, a conservative on gender – came about after he infuriated Kinnock with what would now be seen as a rather New Labour move. He took the Murdoch shilling, signing up as the leftie to Norman Tebbit’s Tory on ...”

“... furious eloquence about Israel’s land grabs and Arafat’s strategic failures. He also became a champion of a binational state for both peoples, an idea that had once been promoted by ‘cultural Zionists’ such as Judah Magnes and Martin Buber, and long since been buried by the Zionist mainstream. Aware of this irony, Said once mischievously described ...”

“... let me see how teachers are thinking these days. Her first choice was Doug Lemov’s Teach like a Champion, a popular grab-bag of pedagogical techniques presented with Dale Carnegie-like headings: No Opt Out. Right Is Right. Name the Steps. Stretch It. The book comes with a DVD so you can watch the moves repeatedly – stance, posture, voice, hand-actions ...”

“... colonial powers withdrew. Spanish Sahara was first on the list for annexation. Istiqlal was the champion of Greater Moroccanism, which began as a reaction against colonial rule, but turned rapidly into a vehicle for Moroccan neo-imperialist sentiment and a means of challenging Algeria: Istiqlal had always called for Spain to decolonise the Sahara and hand ...”