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“... from the past. In the opening chapter, Seth, the narrator, is roaming Manhattan on foot, as is his habit, recording everything on his machine. ‘People and places. Sidewalk smokers, lovers’ quarrels, drug deals … it was all reality, a quality I had lately begun to crave, as if I were deficient in some necessary vitamin or mineral.’ He is ...”

“... or literature in society’. And a decade ago, when controversy over the curriculum was at a peak, John Guillory added that debates about literary and artistic canons merely disguised the simple fact that they weren’t very important to anyone’s self-fashioning. By the late 1990s the humanities appeared marginal even to the universities, driven as they were ...”

“... uncharted wilds out west? No one could say. The captain packed up a massive circular tusk, a three-foot-long femur and some ten-pound teeth, carried them around for several months as he went about the tricky task of eradicating the Chickasaw nation, and finally delivered the relics, after a stopover in New Orleans, to Paris, where they confounded naturalists ...”

“... spirals through the oyster glow/ Of dawn dope and fog in LA’s/Bel Air, punted perfectly. The foot/That punted it is absolutely stoned.’ The poems in These Days, published in 1989, are more assuredly exhibitionist (‘My penis/Rises, hearing its name, like a dog.//I ought to cut it off/And feed it to itself’), but it is with 1993’s My Tokyo that ...”

“... spring of 1953, during the first ever visit by an American secretary of state to the Middle East, John Foster Dulles made a point of including Cairo on his itinerary. Eisenhower and Dulles wanted Egypt to meet the Europeans halfway, i.e. to settle for something less than full sovereignty; to give Russia the cold shoulder, i.e. to side with the West in the ...”

“... wan, sometimes wanton, according to the interplay between Humbert’s sentimentality and desire. John le Carré’s Perfect Spy, Magnus Pym, owes his training to a con man father. The only way for the child to know what is going on (Ricky Pym’s words and actions don’t tell him – on the contrary, they are monstrous mystifications) is to keep watch, to ...”

“... You might think that Trafalgar Square says it all. Its massive column surmounted by the 18-foot-high statue of Horatio Nelson, the bas-reliefs at the base commemorating his ships’ destruction of the French and Spanish fleets and the city of Copenhagen, the surrounding monuments to various imperial warriors: surely all this sums up what the Royal Navy’s command of the oceans in the 18th and early 19th centuries was quintessentially about? The greatest achievement of the second volume of N ...”

“... that fighting men must have clear roads. I do not go on the roads on bicycle, in car or on foot. Whether I am at work or at home, I just stay put.’ At the end, in bold black type, was: ‘Cut this out and keep it.’ What if one heard the news of invasion while engaged in sport? The verses by Captain Harry Graham in an earlier day may have come to ...”

“... all Conservatives were similarly opposed to doctrine and ideology. To choose just two examples, John Buchan, like Disraeli a novelist and Conservative MP, maintained in the 1920s that Conservatism was ‘above all things a spirit not an abstract doctrine’. And ten years later, Stanley Baldwin warned a Canadian audience not to change the basis of their ...”

“... She may have had an abortion which injured her health, or the jealous Nora may have put her foot down. In one account it was Joyce, not Nora, who called a halt to her career. Lucia had also been abandoned by a series of largely caddish lovers, the last of whom she thought deserved a prison sentence for the way he had treated her. It may have been this ...”

“... rebuking the sex-mad present for jeering at the platitudes of old-style courtship: ‘They had foot-kissing, we have toe-sucking. You still prefer our side of the equation?’ Again, there are sharp details (‘Tolstoy wrote in his journal: "Turgenev – can-can. Sad"’) and yet another echo of Flaubert (this time invoking a famous passage in ...”

“... be one factor in explaining why the nickname has stuck. It was named after the Colossus, the 120-foot bronze statue commissioned by (and perhaps originally representing) Nero that was part of the display of the Golden House and continued to stand near the amphitheatre at least into the fourth century. Nero and the Colosseum have in modern times come to ...”

“... in Bad Decline (1996), concerned a down-on-its-luck theme park with a Blacksmith Shoppe, a ninety-foot section of the Erie Canal, and a holographic projection of Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederate States. It also featured a family of dead homesteaders who carry on reading and doing their laundry as though it were still 1865. In ...”

“... with secessionist movements in Nagaland, Punjab, West Bengal and Kashmir outflanked or on the back foot. And then came the rise of Narendra Modi. The BJP victory in 2014 was a reaction to Congress’s dominance and corruption, but it has been followed by a thorough rejection of pluralist traditions in favour of Madhav Sadashiv Golwalkar’s vision of ...”

“... got murdered on her honeymoon. I said. I was twisting facts for no reason. Her partner put his foot on her head.’We assume that at some point, at least, Aneliya has been to bed with her father; perhaps it is a perennial arrangement. ‘I wrapped my legs around him,’ she says, congratulating him after he is booked for the gig whose secret recording ...”