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“... and to equalise consumption, inhibited the competitive urge and with it the desire to steal, rob, burgle or attack neighbours and friends in adversity. But was this true? What did ‘criminals do during the war’? Anyone seeking the answer to this question, as indeed to other questions of a more comprehensive kind, will have difficulty finding it in ...”

“... housewives’ larders to make sure that they had no more than a week’s food’; ‘I drove young women round town, sending them into shops to see if they could trick the assistants into supplying goods off ration’; ‘I was sent to jail for hiding my Canadian Army lover in a wall cupboard for a month’; ‘I blew safes in the Blitz, relying on bombs ...”

“... to disregard this; it is self-contradictory in the Cretan Liar tradition, and in any case it would rob her of any sense of purpose in life. Dora, like several of Pullinger’s characters, is living on the dole and therefore has a stronger need to fend off her suspicion of the pointlessness of it all than any of Barthelme’s figures. Tiny Lies is a ...”

“... the exercise just one more example of cultural arrogance: ‘I had often wondered secretly what a young American could teach the Chinese farmers who had been farming for generations on the same land and by the most skilful use of fertilisers and irrigation were still able to produce extraordinary yields.’ But farmers welcomed conversations about seed ...”

“... manners. In Aleph’s duetting with Harvey we are to hear a song of foolish innocence, sung by two young people about to trip over the threshold of life, not an idiom resonant with social and educational privilege. The ‘king-size sheet from Liberty’s sale’ which serves as the best table-cloth at Clifton is just a prop on a stage set. Far from wishing to ...”

“... the judge decided treatment wouldn’t be helpful. He was sent down for 20 years. In 1613, a young German girl, Maria Ostertag of Ellwangen, came to the authorities, confessed that she was a witch and implicated 34 other people. She had copulated with Satan in horrific secret rituals – his penis, she said, was hard, cold and hurtful. She also claimed ...”

“... of safety first. But the importance of Jewish resisters is striking: there were Communists and Young Communists, MOE (Main d’Oeuvre Etrangère) some of whom spoke only or mostly Yiddish, Jewish boy-scouts who turned into maquisards, Jewish petites mains from the clothing industries who turned into urban guerrillas. There were also freelance recruits to ...”

“... almost always men, are quietly, diligently at work in Melville’s films: they break safes and rob banks, organise escapes from prisons and moving trains, prepare themselves to commit murder. These wordless longueurs aren’t entirely silent. Melville orchestrated ticking clocks, footsteps, barking dogs, rain and wind. He also used music sparely to ...”

“... In June 1934, a young Romanian Jew published a book about being a Jew in Romania. Mihail Sebastian’s De Doua mii de ani (‘For 2000 Years’) was not an autobiography or a novel or a diary, although a bit of each. The hero, who is never named, lives the tragicomedy of assimilation in a land and a culture that both invite and repel ...”

“... Burns the Radical (2002), which shows how the American Revolution formed his opinions when he was young, and shaped his expectations of the French Revolution. Patrick Scott Hogg would like Burns to have been an active member of the Dumfries branch of the radical group Friends of the People in 1793; he may have been, but the proof isn’t ...”

“... and shrugged off the matter with the remark that henceforth Monsieur le Comte de Lastic might rob all the good women of Paris of their butter without any protest from him. An even more striking coincidence concerns the writing of the novel Julie (better-known, later, as La Nouvelle Héloïse). Rousseau was at this time living in the Hermitage, Madame ...”

“... enlarges our public. I know that this enlarged public is precisely what vexes retired literati and young aesthetes. But why should we tremble before a clientèle composed of the entire nation?’ It wasn’t long before he was to speak quite differently: ‘we have seen the gutter press in heat, making a profit out of sick minds, driving the public mad for the ...”

“... have Indian friends, politely abstains from doing anything for Willie when he gets to London. As a young man Willie’s father had neglected his education and perversely taken up with a low-caste, extraordinarily dull girl, flouting his father’s choice of bride. He broke his vow of sexual abstinence, taken on the model of Gandhi, and so Willie was born, and ...”

“... and on the other, that Nazi architecture is profoundly bad, however good it may look. When he was young, Krier argued that it was the melancholy duty of every architect of principle to give up any idea of building at all. ‘A responsible architect cannot possibly build today … Building can only mean a greater or smaller degree of collaboration in a ...”

“... forces. The state machinery was dismantled. Direct imperial rule seemed feasible to Washington. Young Republicans were sent off to rule Iraq like the offspring of British gentry dispatched to loot India in the 18th century. A 24-year-old Republican who applied for a job at the White House was instead sent to Iraq to reopen the Baghdad stock exchange. It ...”