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“... of The Secret Scripture, come to distil something of the long tragedy of Ireland itself. When Thomas Dunne, a former loyal servant of the Crown, loses his wits somewhere in the transition from the old Ireland to the new, we have a luminous instance of the interweaving of the personal and the social, one of the great virtues of this literary form. It is no ...”

“... to begin to look to criticise the lack of our power to criticise. We wait for abstract impersonal powers to save us, we despise the abstractness of those powers, we loathe ourselves for our own apathy. Mailer believed that the city had to become a state of its own. The derelict docks should be redeveloped, there should be ...”

“... bottle of champagne. She, like her father, was a painter and shared his belief in the therapeutic powers of fizz. ‘Tea? Coffee?’ she asked when I went to have breakfast with her after an overnight flight from the US. ‘Champagne?’ Fred died suddenly in Bombay in 1918 and was buried at the Sewri cemetery. He had been on his way from one empire to the ...”

“... John Yoo at the Justice Department, who set about granting the president as many extraordinary powers as Cheney thought he needed. First up was intercepting, without a warrant, communications to and from the United States (an action forbidden under federal law since 1978), which was soon followed by the decision to try terrorist suspects in military ...”

“... of Okhrana agents, and Reilly signed on with Melville in 1896.Soon afterwards he met Margaret Thomas, the much younger Irish wife of a rich Welsh clergyman. Reverend Thomas died in March 1898, leaving his estate to his pregnant widow. In August that year, no longer pregnant, she married Sigmund Rosenblum at Holborn ...”

“... 60, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala (1984) at 57, Susan Sontag (1990) at 59, Ernest J. Gaines (1993) at 60. Thomas Pynchon was a relatively young 51 when he won, but by 1988 already the author of his major works. The Foundation nonetheless took a big punt on the genius of Richard Powers, who was awarded his MacArthur in 1989, aged ...”

“... to be and said it was.’ The Founders intended a limited government, not a state with regulatory powers over business, not a system of government-subsidised props for the indolent, not a vast, faceless bureaucracy. Any act of constitutional interpretation – at least, any that led to conclusions which disagreed with Goldwater’s – was an act of ...”

“... be made, but possessing apparently no sense of wonder and not much of historical perspective, Thomas Franck doesn’t seem to realise how extraordinary a claim it is. Whoever, anywhere, before our own later 20th century, thought that the world could be ‘fair’? Was ineradicable unfairness not the common perception? And if this has been more or less the ...”

“... genius, on the other hand, tends to ripen with experience – to accumulate slowly. D.M. Thomas was told at the age of 25 by his ex-tutor John Bayley that he would be a late developer. The truth of Bayley’s remark has been demonstrated by the switch Thomas has made, in his forties, from poetry to prose, and ...”

“... words the author himself used of his alter ego Darl in As I lay dying. As Faulkner’s creative powers declined so his reputation grew, aided by his en-Nobelment in 1950. By the time of his death in 1962 he was generally acknowledged to be the greatest American novelist of the 20th century, a judgment which now, with only ten years of the century ...”

“... However, when it was revealed that the Democrats’ vice-presidential nominee for 1972, Senator Thomas Eagleton of Missouri, had been treated for depression, Sargent Shriver, who was married to Edward Kennedy’s sister Eunice, replaced Eagleton as George McGovern’s running mate. The Shrivers’ daughter Maria was later First Lady of California as the ...”

“... is where the spies came in. The wars in Europe had a sharp ideological edge, with foreign Catholic powers conspiring to invade England and often also plotting to assassinate her queen. Alford’s assertion that a ‘fundamental assumption of Elizabeth’s government was that no English Catholic could ever quite be trusted’ is oversimplified – some ...”

“... led him to praise one book and damn another. These same merits and limitations are evident in Thomas Mann and his Family, the first of Reich-Ranicki’s books to be translated into English. This collection of articles, lectures and reviews, skilfully translated by Ralph Manheim, offers a searching reassessment of ...”

“... a self-inflicted lèse-majesté. In another age, the Tower of London would be dusting down Thomas More’s old cell for him. But it would be unfair to dismiss Batten as a know-nothing stirrer, though often his behaviour does seem to fit that description: calling Islam‘a death cult’, claiming that the EU was inspired by Hitler’s plans for Europe ...”

“... required to draw a map of old Palestine, ‘indicating the position of the Jewish tribes’. Thomas Jervis’s map of the Crimean peninsula Biblical Palestine loomed large in the teaching of geography for generations of British children: I can remember drawing maps of it at Sunday school in the 1960s, to accompany my own newspaper supplement featuring ...”