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“... 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 ...”

“... in psychoanalysis and poststructuralism. It’s true that the socialist left remained on the front foot in the early 1970s, while feminism has flourished well beyond that date. This is largely because there were pressing political questions for it to address, which was not true of deconstruction or phenomenology. By and large, however, action – baffled by a ...”

“... defendants (the journalists, Crispin Aubrey and Duncan Campbell, and the former signals corporal, John Berry) meditating passing any information to ‘the enemy’ – except (an important qualification) insofar as the British Security Services have always regarded the British public as the enemy. The ABC Trial was intended to be a sensational public show ...”

“... to Greece. Tony mentions in the poem her absent friends: George Devine, Ron Eyre, Tony Richardson, John and John (Dexter and Osborne), and at the conclusion a cake is brought in and Jocelyn is crowned with laurels. It could be thought pretentious but since Jocelyn is so far from pretentious it seems both fitting and moving.I ...”

“... the dreams that attached themselves to him. In choosing ‘a well-rounded life’ as his subtitle, John Campbell risks some obvious jibes about his increasingly portly subject, but he delivers on its promise. It is a persuasive, if at times indulgent, portrait of a life rich in satisfactions. At its heart were a long, close marriage and three children, to ...”

“... Joyce. Borges was, he proudly wrote in 1925, ‘the first traveller from the Hispanic world to set foot upon the shores of Ulysses’. But this is not entirely true. Instead he was, as he admitted, one of the first of the hordes who had read the novel, but not personally. ‘I confess,’ he wrote, ‘that I have not cleared a path through all seven hundred ...”