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“... his scandalous divorce, and his devotion and financial contributions to the Republicans. When Warren Harding was elected president that November, he invited Mellon to serve as his treasury secretary, not because of his brilliance as a banker or his knowledge of international finance, but because Harding’s first choice had turned him down and the ...”

“... Burke and the more libertarian spokesman of earlier times. His role in the impeachment of Warren Hastings, ‘my old conflict with the corruptions and oppressions which have prevailed in our eastern dominions’, ran concurrently with his counter-revolutionary activism in French affairs. He was thought to be over the top on both issues. The latest ...”

“... had forgotten what they were like. Thinking of him now, I realise that part of him had died, and I hope that he never went on to have children of his own. This is a contradictory and confusing summing-up of a person and a relationship, though perhaps that’s only to be expected when the person and the relationship were themselves contradictory and ...”

“... the Kennedy assassination in Libra. Libra showed what could novelistically be done with the Warren Commission Report, after 24 years of cultural reflection. That book helps one see what DeLillo knows better than to undertake with Hammad, barely three years after publication of the US government’s 9/11 Commission Report. He is up to something more ...”

“... at the age of 18 to Vanderbilt and attracted the attention of John Crowe Ransom and Robert Penn Warren it was glory all the way until he enlisted in the services a decade later. When in 1934 Allen Tate put together a poetry supplement for a magazine, it included several poets with firm reputations, but was headed by five poems from a twenty-year-old ...”

“... matter, but they can’t put it right. Twenty-one years later, her fictional ex-soldier, Septimus Warren Smith, hears the sparrows sing in Greek, believes that his best friend, killed in the war, speaks to him from behind the trees in Regent’s Park – and prefers death to doctors. Hearing the dreaded Dr Holmes about to burst into the room, Septimus flings ...”

“... money, whereas here the Israelis build on stolen Palestinian land with the aid of the US taxpayer. Warren Christopher has arrived, looking as clueless as ever, to enforce a ceasefire on Israel’s terms. But the French have rightly refused to leave the field. The Americans after all are not honest brokers; they are not even dishonest brokers; they are wholly ...”

“... his global war on terror. Yet with George W. Bush a president in the mould of William McKinley or Warren Harding – an affable man of modest talent whose rise in national politics could be attributed primarily to his perceived electability – Cheney and his collaborators were engaged in an effort to enhance their own clout. Bush might serve as the front ...”

“... those follies’). He was right to make a distinction between the best Play Unpleasant, Mrs Warren’s Profession (in which the heroine defies both dramatic convention and dramatic expectation by refusing both marriage and reconciliation with her brothel-keeping mother) and Plays Pleasant like Arms and the Man and Candida, in which the formal ...”

“... audacious poem that Jones described, in almost Miltonic tones, as ‘the last sigh of my departed hope for a renovation of our free Constitution’. At first sight a conventional patronage panegyric (‘Althorp,’ it begins, ‘what forms a state?’), the ode soon shades into radical polemic, with barely moderated talk of ‘Men, who their duties know,/But ...”

“... the place where, when you have to go there,/They have to take you in.’ To which her husband, Warren, replies: ‘I should have called it/Something you somehow haven’t to deserve.’ Home is Marilynne Robinson’s third novel; published four years after Gilead and 27 years after her astonishing debut, Housekeeping, it explores with unsparing precision ...”

“... says of his brother Mycroft, but he could just as well be talking of himself. The reader can’t hope to match his deductions, only marvel at the performance. The era of cold Victorian logic was succeeded by the golden age of the 1920s and 1930s, with its cleverly arranged clues and psycho-social unravelling. In 1928 S.S. Van Dine, the creator of Philo ...”

“... We drove around Georgia in a Chevrolet ‘Jimmy’; it belonged to a girl my friend knew from Warren Wilson College, a girl called Laura who was trying to write poems. She spoke of the millions of poets in America now, of how hard it was to be published or to find a teaching job. When we got to her house, a little wooden thing out on its own with a porch ...”

“... his consciousness of them impelled him to cut his own throat’. When Johnson said, à propos of Warren Hastings, ‘that the best plan for the government of India is a despotick governour,’ he meant not that orientals should be treated ‘with a high hand’ but that despotism would reduce colonial plunder: a good despot would check it, a bad one would ...”

“... bloody crossroads’ where they have so often met, can disown a debt to the Cruiser. I hope that this is enough by way of sorrow and sincerity, though I could certainly have amplified it. Because the plain fact is that his latest book is a disgrace. Even if it doesn’t make one angry, it is a cause for disgust and depression. It fouls his ...”