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“... make an interesting study: James Joyce dreaming of becoming the agent for Irish tweeds in Trieste, Thomas Mann musing that he would have made a good banker, Samuel Beckett contemplating a career as a pilot. ‘I hope I am not too old to take it up seriously nor too stupid about machines to qualify as a commercial pilot,’ Beckett wrote to ...”

“... not experience the same condition in the life that they are just embarking on. The point applies more widely. Wallace does not discuss abortion, but anyone who is glad to be alive must be grateful they were not aborted. This has led some victims of congenital disabilities that are prenatally detectable to oppose prenatal screening, which can result in ...”

“... a body that has ceased to work has, it would seem, few useful applications – its dysfunction more manifest than the sexual and familial forms that fill our tabloids and talk shows. But a body that doesn’t work is, in the early going, the evidence we have of a person who has ceased to be. And a person who has ceased to be is as compelling a prospect as ...”

“... during the Second World War, overseeing the team that made the Normandy landings possible. More than a third of the book is taken up with Austin’s five years in the army, and with the achievements he never talked about, even to his wife. Rowe has produced a marvellous book, which manages to be both exhaustive and thoroughly absorbing. It ...”

“... had its day. Geoffrey Elton, so much of whose career has been occupied with the achievements of Thomas Cromwell, has never thought biography to be the fitting means of approaching him. Biography now belongs to the margins of historical writing. The economic and sociological determinism of the 20th century has questioned the influence of great men, while its ...”

“... Thomas Sheridan, the father of the more famous Richard Brinsley Sheridan, devoted himself in the 1760s to ‘rubbing away the roughnesses of the Scottish tongue’. His volume of Lectures on Elocution was once a great hit in Edinburgh. The other Thomas Sheridan, known as Tommy to the tabloids and to friends and enemies alike, is the former leader of the Scottish Socialist Party, and his efforts to represent himself in a defamation case against the News of the World has been providing the city with a theatrical spectacle the Edinburgh Festival will struggle to equal ...”

“... has made monotone what was polychrome, are indigo (blue), gamboge (yellow) and brown lake (purple).Thomas Girtin was born in 1775 and died at 27, perhaps of asthma, although nameless dissipation and even sitting sketching on cold ground have been given as possible causes of death. What he achieved in his short life shows how various the tasks undertaken by a ...”

“... have been forced over the last few years to recognise that Bentham’s idea of government was far more sophisticated than the particular pieces of legislation usually labelled Benthamite. Now a remarkably thorough investigation of his life and writings emphasises and develops what Keynes pointed out forty years ago: that there was much ...”

“... administration’s America First Energy Plan, which will increase US dependence on fossil fuels: more fracking, more coal-mining, more pipelines. There’s nothing to convince them of: nobody who has worked in the hydrocarbon business can be in any real doubt that carbon dioxide causes ...”

“... as it’s called in the UK – trails behind at about ten thousand copies a year, followed still more distantly by the two volumes of Glass family stories, Franny and Zooey and Raise High the Roofbeam, Carpenters. Lots of readers love Holden Caulfield but the Glass family fans, though fewer, are just as passionate. I read The Catcher in the Rye in high ...”

“... attack, we would see ‘again (with a vengeance) … how tenaciously Americans remember’ – or more to the point misremember – ‘that day of infamy’. Three months later, 9/11 gave us a Pearl Harbor redux far worse than Dower could have imagined. That politicians should draw an analogy between a surprise attack by four hijacked planes manned by 20 ...”

“... he was steadily building his sprawling dream house. The Story of San Michele is made up of 30-odd more or less free-standing chapters, though these loosely connected scenes from Munthe’s life are framed by an account of discovering, buying and rebuilding the villa on Capri. The Capri passages appear to be set in a continuous mythic present. ‘I sprang from ...”

“... Western Europe demonstrated against the deployment of Nato’s cruise missiles.2 On 12 June 1982, more than a million people assembled in Central Park in New York to call for a nuclear weapons freeze: ‘The gathering remains perhaps the largest political demonstration in a single locale in US history.’ Ronald Reagan was unpersuaded. On 8 March 1983, he ...”

“... bravery. Vasily Chuikov, the Soviet commander at Stalingrad, boasted that Pavlov’s men killed more German soldiers than died in the capture of Paris. The real Pavlov survived and proved his heretical credentials after the war by becoming an archimandrite in the Sergeyev Posad monastery outside Moscow. Grossman, who covered the battle of Stalingrad as a ...”

“... The English have never been unduly admiring of their own great men. All of Thomas Carlyle’s efforts failed to establish Oliver Cromwell securely in the Victorian pantheon. The names of Lord Nelson and the Duke of Wellington summon up public houses rather than heroes. Winston Churchill in this century, like the Elder Pitt in the 18th and the Younger Pitt in the 19th, was buried with ceremony then swiftly consigned to history: which means that for the bulk of the population he became irrelevant ...”