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“... was voiced by Rousseau in the Discourse on the Origin of Inequality: material abundance becomes a mark of status and so casts down the poor. Another is that commercialism excites a servile pandering to buyers. In 1766 the Charleston Tribune noted that ‘luxury naturally creates want, and that want, whether artificial or real, has a tendency to make men venal ...”

“... of pauses and political aspiration alike as descending directly from the same qualities in Patrick Hamilton; John Arden’s cascades of language and desire from O’Casey’s; or, to take an American example, Joseph Heller’s Catch 22 from the savagery of Ring Lardner’s The Ecstasy of Owen Muir. Small wonder that writers from Robert Graves to Noel Coward to ...”

“... counterparts, with rare skill; compared to the recent The American Establishment by Leonard and Mark Silk, Steel’s portrait is far more effective precisely because, like Lippmann himself, Steel understands that what matters is how it is animated, what a master of its contradictions and conjunctures can manipulate in it, and not only what, stated as if it ...”

“... to the UCL Constitution Unit, ‘A New Supreme Court for the United Kingdom’, with no question mark to round off its title. In a panoptic survey, he acknowledged that accidental and anomalous arrangements had on occasion turned out to work well, but contended that the appellate jurisdiction of the House of Lords was an opposite case: a recurrent disaster ...”

“... but damming the Mississippi above St Louis, reviewing blueprints in Washington and renovating Fort Hamilton in Brooklyn. Only during the US invasion of Mexico did he see combat, and even then, as a staff officer, his job was reconnaissance and gun positions. Lee remained aloof from the partisan fury of the Jacksonian era. But like most army engineers, he was ...”

“... only in English translation). While he was exploiting this dubious permit, his secretary, William Hamilton, was voyaging up the Nile as far south as Aswan and Philae, having already secured the Rosetta Stone for the British Museum. ‘The East offers an ambitious man a vast field,’ Henry Layard, then aged 25, remarked in 1842 after nearly three years ...”

“... To begin at the beginning: what was the story with Cleggmania Mark I? Was it just a dream? It is a truism of political science that what happens in election campaigns doesn’t make any real difference. By the time the formal campaigning starts the voters pretty much know where they stand. They then have to wait patiently (or impatiently) for a few weeks while politicians and journalists get their knickers in a twist over imagined gaffes and surges, swings and comebacks ...”

“... of my country and you’re not even Irish, you English cunt. You can stick it up your bollocks.’ Mark points out that ‘you’re not even Irish, you English cunt’ is like something out of Beckett. Andy wonders whether ‘you can stick it up your bollocks’ is an Irish expression or a stroke of inspiration on Keane’s part. Myself, I take a more ...”

“... poem ‘The Flaw’, addressed to a woman lying beside him: ‘Dear Figure curving like a question mark’. Callisto’s girlfriend ‘lay like a tawny question mark facing him’. In any case, Pynchon now warns us not ‘to underestimate the shallowness of my understanding of entropy’, or of those scientists the story ...”

“... he tested the rare limits of his individual talent. When teams discovered no single player could mark him, they sent two or three or four defenders at him, and he worked out ways between or around or over them, and scored and scored and scored. But his club kept losing in the final stages, against the ‘bad boys’ of Detroit, uglier but more disciplined ...”

“... Brits like Richard Long and Gilbert and George, on old bugbears like Warhol and Richard Hamilton. Shortly before Fuller’s death, he thought the tide was turning: Serota seemed to be coming into line, even Saatchi was investing in the School of London. Then it turned right back. In his last completed book, Theoria: Art and the Absence of ...”

“... on the evidence of Lewis’s perceptive and absorbing biography, that verdict falls wide of the mark. ‘Oh my sweet​ , how glad I am that we are not rich,’ Harold Nicolson wrote to his wife, Vita Sackville-West, after a visit to Cliveden in 1936, complaining about the ‘ghastly unreality about it all … like living on the stage of the Scala theatre ...”

“... profit, to be obtained through the collection of fees and opportunities for patronage.The aim of Mark Knights’s book is to explain why Britain took so long to move from the old conception of office-holding to our present one by showing how the issue was debated over more than two centuries. A historian of the 17th century by training, Knights stresses that ...”

“... James Melville with the poet’s own experience of motherhood: the pay-off is too much like an Ian Hamilton poem (arms damp with flowers ‘from holding them so long’), but the narrative leaps and elisions make this a powerful poem about mothers and sons. There are some entertaining pieces about sex, too, one describing a wicked old neighbour at the baths ...”

“... bands, bebop quartets and Black Country dance bands; for a while I was the token white in the Andy Hamilton Caribbean Combo.’ He played in jazz clubs, town halls, village halls, strip clubs, dance halls, drinking clubs and hotels. None of this work finds its way into the poetry, at least directly, but being away from Birmingham for so long had given him an ...”