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“... be the promised reward of our reading. It is the no less imaginary ‘quincunx’ of trees which marks the site of the treasure: in other words, the structure of freely circulating symbols which both creates the fictional lure and negates its reality. As Durrell well understands, paranoia is the indispensable aid of the writer of fiction. We would not strive ...”

“... architects of his time. His work as an architect has been admirably studied in a book by Deborah Howard (also published by Yale and still in print) and it is only touched on by Boucher. His most successful buildings are among the best known in the world – the Mint, the Library and the Loggetta around St Mark’s. They have a plasticity, a richness of ...”

“... from familiar intellectual rations, and we can hear the sceptical, more or less kindly quotation marks slipping into place around the words ‘common wisdom’, or at least around the word ‘wisdom’. Kermode never wrote anything the main army couldn’t understand; but nor did he write anything the main army could have managed on its own. The discreet ...”

“... as the legitimate leader of Conservatism. The rejection of Thatcher by her purported followers marks a curious turning point in the fortunes of the Conservative Party. Up to this point the Tories were remarkable for their defiance of the laws of electoral gravity. Surely, it was assumed, the coming of mass democracy must mean the inevitable defeat of the ...”

“... 1928, a previously unknown painting turns up on the London art market. It belongs to a Major Henry Howard of Surrey. He is 45 years old. His father has just died and left him a large estate, and he’s selling off much of it – houses, land, family heirlooms. There are death duties; he has five young daughters and a marriage that’s going to end soon. He ...”

“... of the English state. Both rest their weight on an individual whose life story is full of question marks. There is no tidy box of historical explanation into which we can put him. The brisk judgment of Hugh Trevor-Roper was that Cromwell ‘was a freak in English history’. It has always been easier to fall back on broad-brush assertions or to dismiss him ...”

“... Pantheon, with its huge rotunda. Opened in 1772, it survived until 1937, when the site was sold to Marks and Spencer’s. It was conceived as winter assembly rooms, an indoor equivalent of the pleasure gardens of Vauxhall and Ranelagh, and the neoclassical design by James Wyatt was thought by Gibbon to be ‘the wonder of the 18th century and the British ...”

“... of court, among many other political reverses. The current incumbent at the Home Office, Michael Howard, has been able to rely on the example set by his tenacious predecessor when resisting calls for his resignation after similar tumultuous events. There is at least a kind of naked honesty about such determined ambition. In the early Conservative era, the ...”

“... stuff. Berger’s bleat drew a warm seconding letter from the reliably reactionary Elizabeth Jane Howard and her friend Sybille Bedford. If Berger had slyly blamed all the mayhem onto ‘the Rushdie affair’, these two went him one better in the business of culpability. The violence was not the result of some artfully displaced ‘affair’ but of the ...”

“... a more guarded sentence. A similar abrupt confidence (which reminds me of Dame Helen Gardner) marks her observation that Miranda’s strangely violent language to Caliban in The Tempest has nothing to do with sexual repression on the island but is, in fact, detached from the character of Miranda, mere impersonal poetic affirmation of the theme of ...”

“... about its lack. Though literary uncle and nephew remained devoted to one another, Boule de Suif marks a moment of separation. Maupassant had submitted his early attempts at writing to Flaubert, who had responded with detailed advice. He was especially harsh on Maupassant’s verse, just as he had been on Louise Colet’s (this despite – or because of ...”

“... in Mackayesque bids for topicality, though it’s worth remarking how oddly off the point both Howard Davies’s production at the National Theatre and Gale Edwards’s at the English National Opera looked.) By 1820 even the committed Protestant and North Briton Walter Scott had to recognise, in The Abbot, this guilty but irresistible heroine as a member ...”

“... by Ernest Bucalossi, in brackets ‘very animated’.Here is ‘The Mosquito’s Parade’ by Howard Whitney, ‘At the Temple Gates’ by Gatty Sellars, and sheets and sheets of Ivor Novello. Every Sunday night she thumps out these old standards on the Gilpin Place piano, with occasional updates, ‘Forgotten Dreams’ by Leroy Anderson, the theme from ...”

“... Law (1997); and Fox Nation v. Reality: The Fox News Community’s Assault on Truth by Mark Howard. I toss these books together to indicate how this digital age, which prides itself on its abundance and freedom of information, has become so uneasy about the pervasiveness of lying. We might add to these indictments three of Oborne’s earlier ...”

“... that got him the offer to come to Hollywood and make a picture for RKO. The Martian script was by Howard Koch, who would later work on Casablanca and The Letter, but everyone always knew that Welles’s contribution was central. He had advised Koch to employ the present tense and let the story unfold as a piece of live radio: it would leak out, a string of ...”