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“... minor writer with a major style’. Gore Vidal thinks that Updike ‘describes to no purpose’. James Wood complains that Updike fills his characters’ thoughts with showy phrases that don’t suit them or their situations; and that the ‘very pretty ribbons’ of Updike’s style are a kind of kitsch, which expresses a complacent confidence in the ...”

“... Orwell’s political prose to the kind of scrutiny ordinarily reserved for the novels of Henry James. John Sutherland has been reading and rereading Orwell ever since the 1954 BBC dramatisation of Nineteen Eighty-Four alerted him to the novel’s existence. So he feels under no constraint either to bless or to damn a writer whose ...”

“... the epoch in which humans have had a significant impact on the planet. In Against the Grain James Scott describes these early stages as a ‘“thin” Anthropocene’, but ever since, the Anthropocene has been getting thicker. New layers of human impact were added by the adoption of farming about ten thousand years ago, the invention of the steam ...”

“... its own. Ray Charles was recording for Atlantic Records; Sam Cooke had left the Soul Stirrers; James Brown was touring with his Famous Flames. But Otis Redding wasn’t a soul singer yet. Billed as Otis ‘Rockin’ Redding or ‘Rockhouse Redding’, he sang rock and roll and remained heavily indebted to Little Richard. Bouncing around with Jenkins, who ...”

“... Middle East was awash in ‘cheap credit for leveraged buyouts’. Naqvi, the ‘Gulf’s Buyout King’, hobnobbed with presidents, prime ministers and business celebrities, and spoke at investment conferences held by the UN, the World Bank and the World Economic Forum. His firm raised billions from investors, including development finance agencies like the ...”

“... its leading figures have been forgotten, or, in the case of the party’s first prime minister, James Ramsay MacDonald, disowned. The Labour left, then and since, thought the new administration was too timid and had failed to promote socialism. The centre and right of the party felt that the experience of 1924 had confirmed the dangers of taking office ...”

“... at Baalbek. The surrounding buildings are higher than they were when the church was built, but King George shows clear above the roof line, just as he does in Hogarth’s Gin Lane. All in all, the design of the church is majestic – original, strange and energetic. But from the office window we could see that weeds had found a foothold in the ...”

“... in a sermon, learned, lucid, by no means arcane, one of his finest things, which was delivered in King’s College Chapel on 11 May 1986. The passage reads: God’s silent searching flight, When my Lord’s head is fill’d with dew, and all His locks are wet with the clear drops of night; His still, soft call; His knocking-time; the soul’s dumb ...”

“... Frye to sue the other members. When they protested through the Lords of the Admiralty to the King, the Chief Justice had the whole lot of them arrested for contempt and released them, when they apologised, with the warning: ‘Whosoever set themselves up in opposition to the law or think themselves above the law will find themselves mistaken.’ Why ...”

“... dream of a Jewish state over the whole Land of Israel, including the West Bank, captured by King Abdullah of Jordan in 1948 and annexed to his kingdom two years later. But, while preserving his doctrinal purity, Begin proved adept at forming alliances with liberal, nationalist and ultra-nationalist groups as well as break-away groups from the Labour ...”

“...  Henry James​’s novel The Princess Casamassima, which dramatises the world of stray revolutionaries in London in the 1880s, depends on energy coming from opposites. The novel’s protagonist, Hyacinth Robinson, appreciates beauty and feels excluded from the world of privilege around him. He lives an interior life ...”

“... but to the world.’ Equally compelling is the account of what Shakespeare does with Seneca in King Lear – to all appearances the least conventionally Senecan of the tragedies. Having demonstrated how closely Lear’s furious ‘I will do such things’ paraphrases Atreus in Thyestes, Burrow goes on to argue that the whole play can be understood as the ...”

“... to give them extra zest’, while the Man Group is an investment management business, though the James Man who founded the original company was an 18th-century barrel-maker (his firm supplied the navy with rum for almost two hundred years). Touches such as Elysian’s ‘Giraffe carrot’, so large that a single specimen can fill a vegetable dish for Sunday ...”

“... wife and four older children in Warrington, where he had served six terms as mayor. So Ken went to King Edward’s School, got a better education than he would have found at most boarding-schools, grew up heterosexual and entered Magdalen, Oxford in 1945 on a demyship of £50 a year. His spending allowance, ten pounds a week, was larger than that of most ...”