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“... isn’t clear that British politicians appreciated these nuances, though some officials, including Michael Oatley, the MI6 man on the ground, certainly did. The principal IRA objective was an invitingly lowish hurdle, and should have been seen as such: ‘an acknowledgment of the right of the Irish people to determine their own future without interference from ...”

“... fiction. The originator of the genre is a work better than either Faber’s or Waters’s novel: Michael Sadleir’s Fanny by Gaslight. Published in 1940, this went through five impressions in as many months (despite Ministry of Supply paper restrictions) and was filmed as a lush Gainsborough melodrama in 1944, launching the careers of James ...”

“... people who identified themselves as ‘English’, 32.4 million chose that as their sole identity. Michael Ashcroft’s referendum-day poll found that 79 per cent of people who described themselves as ‘English not British’ voted Leave. But there is less evidence for the claim that the English voted for, or currently want, constitutional change. Despite the ...”

“... bullets and other ‘restraining’ measures inflicted by the police, and not only below the Mason-Dixon line. Police killings of young black men, along with the mass incarceration of poor blacks in US prisons, have become the symbol of a national disgrace that is no more hidden than the concealed weapons that far too many Americans carry, and which is a ...”

“... In the fall of 2002, in the company of a dog named Charlie Chaplin and an architect named Michael Meredith, I set out to drive a 1960 Chevy Apache 10 pick-up truck, at 45 mph, from far west Texas to New York City: 2364 miles through desert, suburbs, forests, lake-spattered plains, mountains, farmland, more suburbs and the Holland Tunnel ...”

“... some) of reading The Man without Qualities. It’s rather like reading Thomas Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon. After worrying quite a bit about plot and meaning and when things are going to get moving, you let go and just hang out with the characters, inhabit their world and their arguments and their idiocies pretty much as they do. You begin to read in ...”

“... truth. In less paranoid ages ignorance may just be ignorance. Underworld , like Thomas Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon , is in this sense a post-paranoid novel. When one of DeLillo’s characters thinks of ‘the paranoid élite’, we are meant to catch the friendly irony, the flicker of nostalgia. These are people who believe that the first moonwalk was ‘staged ...”

“... that gives his prose its precision. These letters and the diaries are Maitland’s chief source. Michael Asher’s fine Thesiger: A Biography (1994) chiefly relied on conversations with Thesiger and those who had known him, supplemented by the published works. Now, Maitland’s painstaking use and critical correlation of the Thesiger papers allows him to ...”

“... His father, Squire Haggard (a crusty fellow, but otherwise unlike the old villain invented by Michael Green), had viewed him as fit only to be a greengrocer. The post found for him was that of junior aide to the Lieutenant-Governor of Natal. Within two years, as a sort of legal odd-jobs man, he had been deputed to raise the Union Jack for the first time ...”

“... Penguin Guide to English Literature. Few friends, however loyal, escaped. Wilfrid Mellers, H.A. Mason and others all fell foul of him in one way or another. As to his enemies, the Lucases and Houghs and Tillyards, they could hardly be said to have betrayed him: they did the work of the devil in other ways. The relationship with T.S. Eliot was the strangest ...”

“... Is there anything stranger than a pop star out of time? Before Elvis Presley, before Michael Jackson, there was Al Jolson – ‘the most popular entertainer of the first half of the 20th century,’ as Michael Rogin describes him. Eyes wide and mouth agape, arms outstretched and face painted black, Jolson concludes his performance in The Jazz Singer (1927) down on one knee, serenading the delighted actress who plays his mother in a voice as strong and piercing as a foghorn ...”

“... correspondence, but which gives a good indication of his social or professional circle: James Mason, Charlie Chaplin, Pablo Picasso. There are letters related to and surrounding the making of particular films: The River, Le Carrosse d’ or, Elena et les hommes. These really do provide detailed information on how the screenplays are put together, how the ...”

“... was the missing link back to the heyday and personalities of modernism. He wrote little (‘The mason stirs:/words!/Pens are too light./Take a chisel to write’), but what he wrote ever more powerfully endures. Reading him now, there is an overpowering drench of the 1920s and 1930s, and a suggestion of how the style of progressive verse might have gone ...”

“... reality and the disreputable nature of the contract between them’. Wright has been criticised by Michael Ignatieff for wanting to restore Herbert Morrison’s London of municipal socialism. This underestimates the subtlety of his plea for a restored sense of the public interest, and his understanding that there is no way back; to expose the dishonesty and ...”

“... Hardy, Maurice Hewlett, Anthony Hope, W.J. Locke, E.V. Lucas, J.W. Mackail, John Masefield, A.E.W. Mason, Gilbert Murray, Henry Newbolt, Owen Seaman, G.M. Trevelyan, H.G. Wells and Israel Zangwill (Arthur Quiller-Couch and Rudyard Kipling sent messages of support). At first glance, this may seem to be the literary and intellectual establishment in its ...”