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“... careless way, her neck broken at the bottom of a well’. But that’s how trauma works. Primo Levi died in a similar fashion, decades after surviving Auschwitz.A Passage North is a novel about war’s aftermath: we don’t hear bombs and shells falling. In Arudpragasam’s previous novel, The Story of a Brief Marriage, we hear little else, ‘each ...”

“... The subject thus had a discreditable aura from the outset. There is something distasteful to the Michael Oakeshotts and Norman Tebbits of this world in claiming that one’s own culture can be as dispassionately dissected as someone else’s. It is also bad news for the champions of colonialism that other people’s cultures appear to be in just as good a ...”

“... confronts the beholder far more boldly. Charles Hope, in his remarkable monograph on Titian, like Michael Jacobs in a brisk and entertaining polemic on the nude in painting, rejects the idea that this is a painting of Venus.1 It represents simply ‘a mortal female lying on a bed’, as Hope puts it, ‘gazing at us with a startlingly direct and unambiguous ...”

“... West Park Row, which he shares with his second wife, Johanna, and their two children, Eva and Michael. Arthur’s first wife, Franziska, was killed at Auschwitz, but his memories of her are so vivid that he is able to project images from their past together onto the wall of the title, a symbol, for him, of both the limits of meaning and of his ...”

“... even the photography was practised and programmed. ‘They would loan us a Hasselblad,’ said Michael Collins, the third member of the Apollo 11 mission, who stayed behind in the moon’s orbit in Columbia, the command module, while his companions descended to its surface. Mia Fineman, curator of an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum in New ...”

“... boys with what I still think of as normal classic names: Simon, Mark, Peter, Andrew, Paul, Martin, Michael, Stephen, Richard, Robert, David. Girls’ names remained more modish: some Sarahs, Anns and Elizabeths and even some residual Marys, but also plenty of Janets, Jackies, Lisas and Debbies, who soared and plummeted through the bestseller lists in the space ...”

“... exhorted, ‘Think harder. Get it right. (Why are liberals so afraid of their own philosophy?)’ Michael Walzer, co-editor of Dissent, recently issued a call to arms against radical Islam even though the US has already helped ignite wars in several Muslim countries: ‘So here I am, a writer, not a fighter,’ he urged, ‘and the most helpful thing I can do ...”

“... of Israelis and made Palestinian lives hell. Shortly after it, Israel’s Labour prime minister, Levi Eshkol, a relative moderate, approved the colonisation of the West Bank. The Labour Party never really opposed the process, though for years it seemed to have its doubts. That way of carrying on – appearing indecisive, sounding hesitant, while acting ...”

“... to American imperialism is sustained chiefly through such US exports as Chomsky, Gore Vidal and Michael Moore. But although his recent examples come from the war on terror, the political development they represent is not, according to Agamben, peculiar to the United States under the Bush presidency. It is part of a wider change in governance in which the ...”

“... indiscriminately before tripping over its own feet or mistakenly ingesting a carton of yoghurt. Michael Drayton and his followers seem especially prone to disaster. Fortunately, the anthology is a critical as well as a scholarly achievement. Fowler’s eye for what is good, or at least notable, about a poet’s work seems more or less unfailing. I ...”

“... and the complex typologies of figure and device that governed the production of literary texts. Levi-Strauss’s great project of structural anthropology was likewise intended to demonstrate the invariant ‘grammars’ of collective representation, such that the analyst could discover an underlying logic at work in the myths, customs and kinship-systems of ...”

“... partly because of the commotion caused by the change of national leadership, the passing of Michael Oakeshott did not attract much public notice. Even the Spectator, which might have been expected to mark the event with a full salute, ignored it for half a year, before carrying a curiously distracted piece by its editor, reporting strange losses in the ...”

“... old Jewish community of Baghdad, moved to London as a young man, and came under the influence of Michael Oakeshott, then Britain’s best-known conservative political philosopher. On the moderate right was Anthony Smith, a British-born practising Orthodox Jew, who taught history in London throughout a long career. Convinced that the Jews were the most ...”

“... a provincial rabbi; she had fought her way to the music academy of Berlin, changing her name from Levi or Levy, and then to the concert hall. In Salomon’s play, Charlotte – now a reticent, troubled teenager – sees the point of Paulinka, even if she’s too quick to know what’s right for her stepdaughter and too busy to spend much time with her. With ...”

“... Richard Gambino’s Blood of My Blood: The Problem of Italian Americans, for example, and Michael Arlen’s Passage to Ararat. Capitalism turned all this into profit, initially through print publication and the rise of professional genealogy services, and on to the consumer DNA tests and paywalled online databases of today. Genealogy became ...”