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“... chief of defence staff, Sir Nicholas Houghton. Interviewed on 8 November, he confided to a purring Andrew Marr that the army was deeply vexed by Corbyn’s unilateralism, which damaged ‘the credibility of deterrence’. On the same show, Maria Eagle, a PLP sniper with a seat on the front bench as the shadow defence secretary, essentially told Marr that she ...”

“... work done by scholars in recent decades: Richard Bulliet on the economic importance of the camel, Andrew Watson on the role of the Arabs as introducers of new crops, Oleg Grabar on the Dome of the Rock, and so on. It is, however, a tribute to both the scope and depth of Lewis’s research in the past half-century that so much of the material he draws on is ...”

“... bring about the actuarially predictable consequences. Fleming, who died at 56, was one of those. Andrew Lycett’s first-rate biography, published in 1995, almost doesn’t need its text, since the photos tell a perfectly clear story of how the (I hadn’t realised) strikingly beautiful young Fleming turned into a prematurely knackered roué with an air of ...”

“... Abbey’ since those were built in the 18th century. Barker’s book makes fruitful use of Andrew Prescott’s doctoral thesis on the judicial records of the rising and Carolyn Fenwick’s three-volume edition of the poll tax returns of 1377, 1379 and 1381. One striking fact to emerge is the degree to which the poll tax of 1381 was evaded: what ...”

“... the man who has the best claim to have founded our modern idea of the royal family. The reader of Andrew Roberts’s new biography rejoices too. In many ways, the king’s madness is the most interesting thing about a monarch who never included among his delusions the idea that he was anything but a very ordinary person. No other writer, except possibly Alan ...”

“... a man who doesn’t want the child his wife is pregnant with, was published here last year in Christopher Middleton’s translation.* More recently, PN Review published Gert Hofmann’s ‘The Return of the Prodigal’, a short story translated by his son, about the return of a poet to his father’s house: the son begs the father for ...”

“... seen in an examination of two sections dealing with overtly political writings. Nicholas Canny and Andrew Carpenter introduce ‘The Early Planters: Spenser and his Contemporaries’ by reaffirming Spenser’s status as a great poet in the English tradition, and then by redescribing him as an ‘apologist’ for English rule in Ireland, someone whose writing ...”

“... Hae’ or ‘A Red, Red Rose’. While Paterson’s non-bard is wee enough to fit in a matchbox, Andrew Noble and Patrick Scott Hogg offer a bard of Victorian amplitude. The Canongate Burns runs to over a thousand pages, many of them by Noble and Hogg. A lot less stylish, their introduction alone is almost as long as Paterson’s whole book. They feel ...”

“... By the late Seventies an organisation called the Violet Quill had formed, and its members – Christopher Cox, Robert Ferro, Michael Grumley, Andrew Holleran, Felice Picano, Edmund White and George Whitmore, together with the film critic Vito Russo and the editor and academic George Stambolian – began producing books ...”

“... Virginia Woolf wants to pull down the factory, to operate face to face in the open air. Christopher Isherwood, in some ways her most affectionate and enthusiastic disciple, went through the motions of restating her formula at the outset of some of his own fictions. He is the passive recording camera. Of course nothing could be less true of the ...”

“... these prodigious gatherings, the poetry looks svelte. Yet the 2015 Faber edition of the Poems by Christopher Ricks and Jim McCue itself runs to nearly two thousand densely annotated pages. This, too, is a breathtaking achievement. Very few people will read through all these thousands of pages, and their publication risks making Eliot seem more daunting than ...”

“... I was surrounded by 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 ...”

“... London’. He had always wanted his own magazine and sought out the Eye’s founders – Christopher Booker, Richard Ingrams and Andrew Osmond – and bought the magazine from Osmond for £1500. This was a substantial, though not an enormous investment. Within a year or so, he moved the Eye offices into the ...”

“... War in India: in three volumes he had taken the narrative only to the end of 1857. More recently, Andrew Ward’s moving account of the mutiny at Kanpur weighs in at nearly 700 pages; volumes by Christopher Hibbert and Saul David hover around 500.) Seen from certain perspectives, what had happened was a complete collapse of ...”

“... his lap. Although de Pury modestly concedes that it would be an exaggeration to compare him to Christopher Columbus, he does want us to believe that he is a great explorer. He claims to have spotted Richter when he was still an ‘emerging’ artist. He hasn’t the slightest doubt that ‘contemporary art’ is ‘the New Old Masters’. When, in ...”