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“... political structures and means of debating them. The present volume takes us to Italy and Spain, France and England, the Netherlands and Germany, but not to Catholic, let alone Orthodox, Eastern ‘Europe’, or into the vigorous intellectual life of Islam or the East Asian ecumene, where ‘politics’ certainly existed and were theologically or ...”

“... in a ‘History of Civilisation’ series, in which it joins such works as Charles Burney and David Marshall Lang’s The People of the Hills: Ancient Ararat and Caucasus (1971) and George Lichtheim’s Europe in the 20th Century (1972). Indeed, the back of Lichtheim’s book announced Lewis’s work as forthcoming, though it then bore the title The ...”

“... belongs to that group of writers – T.E. Lawrence in this country, St Exupéry and Malraux in France, D’Annunzio in Italy – who created their personalities out of their reading and then acted out these literary personalities. The difference was that he was also a practical man. John Buchan started as a writer, and even while he was trying to scale the ...”

“... beneficence and humanity … or whatever proceeds from a tender sympathy with others’ (David Hume). Fashionable poems deplored slavery and child labour, and wrung tears from the public on behalf of the distressed. Sterne assured his readers that his purpose in A Sentimental Journey (1768) ‘was to teach us to love the world and our fellow ...”

“... be vastly more popular than the great string quartets, and so on; and this is especially true in France, for reasons that we cannot fathom.’ Sutcliffe quotes Geoffrey Wheatcroft, who described Haydn as the composer whom ‘concert promoters have always regarded as box office death, even if true musicians have a passion for him almost beyond any other ...”

“... Americans seem to relish Presidential biographies. David McCullough’s Truman (1992) was on the bestseller lists for the better part of a year, and his John Adams (2001) is providing an astonishing repeat performance. Robert Caro’s dramatically detailed look at The Years of Lyndon Johnson has been unfolding since 1982, and large chunks of Volume Three have been serialised in the New Yorker ...”

“... of Arran, arrived in England from the Continent. The phrase reads that if Mary (then living in France) did not accept what Cecil considered a reasonable solution to the Scottish revolt, ‘then humbly they [the Scottish Parliament] may commit the governaunce thereof to the next heir of the crown’ – effectively Arran. Cecil’s acceptance of the power ...”

“... Alberto​ Giacometti (b.1901) had his first postwar show in France at the Galerie Maeght in Paris in 1951. From 1941 to 1945, he had been stranded in his native Switzerland, working on tiny sculptures that he brought back to Paris – so the story goes – in matchboxes. He had started scaling up since then, creating the austere works in plaster and bronze for which he’s now remembered ...”

“... put to flight the emperors of both East and West on the same day. What have we to fear from King David and ‘his half-naked natives’?If Walter Espec did say anything of this sort, his words wouldn’t have meant much to his English levies. Some of it is simply false, such as the same-day defeat of both emperors (the events were in fact two years apart, in ...”

“... one does not, from either of their books, quite end up feeling that one ‘knows’ Foucault. David Macey calls his book the Lives of Michel Foucault, remarking that Foucault ‘lived many lives, as an academic, as a political activist, as a child, and as a lover of men’. He thus tackles the business of getting to know Foucault in an ad hoc way, noting ...”

“... and political platform for Labour, has been elaborated with the help of Tony Blair’s adviser, David Miliband, and sees Blair’s election as leader as an epochal event, finally settling Labour’s commitment to social democracy. All of which sounds very much as if Hutton hopes to become a key adviser in a future Blair administration, though the Tories may ...”

“... but a Tory government nor by the sound of it ever wants to. At Birmingham I have a session with David Edgar’s playwrights’ class, then do another ‘Our Alan’ performance for a more general audience. 26 January. Run into Tristram Powell. Andrew Devonshire (sic) has done a diary for the Spectator mentioning the memoir of Julian Jebb (edited by ...”

“... the one occasion I met Vidal was in a television studio where the wife of the talkshow host David Susskind, attempting to launch a separate career, was presiding over her own prospective talkshow. Taking part in the pilot were Vidal, the movie critic Pauline Kael, the actor Ed Asner (TV’s Lou Grant), and myself. Before the taping, Vidal and I chatted ...”

“... high boredom threshold. Indisputably the greatest game ever written for the BBC was Elite, by David Braben and Ian Bell. The aim was to travel through eight galaxies, each with 32 solar systems, trading cargo, battling enemies and becoming a steadily more feared space pirate. Not only were you able to save your progress as you went along, but the game ...”

“... but it did not fundamentally change its course. Like that of his longer lived contemporary David Jones (born five years after Rosenberg, in 1895), Rosenberg’s writing displays a sense of the continuity between a past passionately experienced through poetry and spiritual tradition, and a nearly intolerable present. Rosenberg’s parents were Russian ...”