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“... comes by this morning with just such a helmet looking as if he might be coming off duty from the foot of the Cross.25 July. John Schlesinger dies. The obituaries are more measured than he would have liked, the many undistinguished films he made later in life set against A Kind of Loving and Sunday, Bloody Sunday. He ...”

“... at all. This caricature was a slander on his stature, as Loxton points out: he was actually five foot six, average for a man of that time. But the image of Little Napoleon would be stamped on the public mind; even his indisputable successes could be mocked as evidence of a mismatch of aspiration and endowment. (‘A fiery soul,’ as Dryden said of another ...”

“... That she was toeing the Party line didn’t occur to me, though it did to my companion, John Scaife, another budding conscript, who was much more scathing on the subject and cynical about the tears. 2 February. Ten days or so ago I did an interview for the Today programme in connection with the revival of The History Boys now playing at ...”

“... been a long debate in the Party about its intellectual roots. Did it owe more to R.H. Tawney or to John Rawls? In a free society, what relative importance should be attached to the values of liberty and equality? How could Social Democrats distinguish themselves from Croslandite democratic socialists if the Labour Party’s temporary recovery was ...”

“... perhaps themselves descended from Cayuga Indians. It seems as though the boot is on the other foot, that the high have been made low, and that Kubla Khan’s ‘pleasure-dome’ has become some top-security hush-hush installation. The narrative of ‘Madoc’ proceeds from the interrogation of South, in best Sci-Fi manner: ‘And, though one of his ...”

“... The action spans fifteen years, from the end of the Depression to the advent of Eisenhower and John Foster Dulles. Vidal keeps track of the major political developments but concentrates on the inter-generational conflicts between Burden and Blaise and their respective children. From time to time a famous politician appears in the middle distance – we ...”

“... do is watch it And hope that this time our side doesn’t botch it. The Secretary of Defence, John Nott, Has made a whopping balls-up in the House. The Foreign Secretary’s on the spot, Loudly accused of being short of nous. The top gun-boat exponent of the lot, A prancing lion where once crouched a mouse, Is Michael ...”

“... marriages, television sets and cartons of milk. One thinks of Garrison Keillor, David Leavitt, and John Updike, whose most luminous descriptions are located in ‘the post-pill paradise’ of pleasure, estrangement and divorce. Thus the ‘normal’, whether a word, a category or a quality, loses its Larkinesque dullness and takes on an impossibly romantic ...”

“... The Ancient Paths was not so revolutionary. It belongs squarely to a tradition dating back to John Toland’s History of the Druids. Toland, who seems to have invented the term ‘pantheism’, believed he had uncovered ‘the philosophy of the Druids concerning the Gods, human souls, Nature in general and in particular the Heavenly Bodies’, but died ...”

“... 1954) but on its ability to tell complex stories – its contributors included William Faulkner, John Updike, Jack Kerouac and Don DeLillo. In Blood in the Garden, Herring is firmly in narrative mode, and he wants to remind us what a good narrative sport basketball is.This is true for several reasons, some more interesting than others. First, the obvious ...”

“... 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 ...”