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“... to discuss things openly with them. But Straw had a difficulty. The UK ambassador in Washington, Christopher Meyer, had already published a memoir, DC Confidential, which also dealt with the run-up to the invasion of Iraq. If Meyer had been allowed to publish on what grounds could Greenstock be stopped? Straw’s tortuous reasoning, given to the Public ...”

“... writing. As he would have wished, she puts more of an emphasis on the historical novels – Witch Wood (1927) was his favourite – and his status as a Scottish monument, a descendant of Scott and Stevenson. There’s nothing fanciful about this – Janet Adam Smith reported that Clement Attlee pointed out to her a borrowing from Kidnapped in The Thirty-Nine ...”

“... he calls his ‘low-falutin’ ways, Child nonetheless quotes Shakespeare, Ezra Pound and James Wood, obsesses about the ugliness of certain words (‘onto’, ‘uni’), and mentions that he’s seen Waiting for Godot ‘about forty times’. He’s also a trivia and anagram fiend who was once struck by the simultaneous revelation, while watching the ...”

“... memoir-writing by the upper classes, remains first-rate. For much of the volume we are in a remote wood-chopping world, a species of Arcadia – though a far from innocent one – in which earth-shaking events do not intrude. Leacock, it emerges, first became a humorous lecturer to raise funds for the Belgians in 1914, but, apart from that, World War One (in ...”

“... better: his first loyalty was to his own creations. It is lucky that he was building while stone, wood, brick and tiles, and the craftsmen and money to use them, were still to be had. He died on the first day of 1944. During the war he went on with his plans for Liverpool Cathedral, which never rose higher than the crypt. It seems unlikely that we will ever ...”

“... the Silcock and Clunis cases. (Ben Silcock climbed into the lions’ den at London Zoo; Christopher Clunis killed Jonathan Zito in a London Underground station.) The subsequent inquiry, the Ritchie Report, had a profound effect on mental health care: procedures became more formalised, tight systems of accountability were introduced, and it became ...”

“... punishment any more (except for Islamic fundamentalists and those Christian evangelicals who think Christopher Hitchens will go to hell), but the concept of an afterlife is still hard to throw over. The other day, my parents told me of an ageing friend who had recently abandoned his lifelong atheism and become a Christian. He told my parents, both churchgoing ...”

“... himself and the stupefied awe his critics feel for him. One of Hill’s most notable champions is Christopher Ricks and we may approach this volume by applying the critical principles which Ricks enunciated in a recent consideration of Empson’s work. Ricks praised his critical master in this journal for speaking ‘with the direct personal commitment ...”

“... is spoken of’, and the reader, rolling around ‘singular pitch’, murmurs to himself: ‘Christopher Ricks.’ Nothing is more Ricksian than Hill’s phrase in The Triumph of Love about Ruskin’s ‘wedded/incapacity’ (meaning, at least primarily, his famous disappointment on his wedding-night):                   Ruskin’s ...”

“... French theory, with deconstruction specifically, but Empson himself would have none of it. When Christopher Norris sent him some writings by Derrida and others, Empson said he thought ‘those horrible Frenchmen’ were ‘so very disgusting, in a simple moral or social way, that I cannot stomach them’. He also managed, perhaps unintentionally, to invent ...”

“... comes some painfully literary poetry which furnishes praise for the great and famous dead. ‘The Wood’ proposes to console us for             whatever falls apart In the chaos of these times by invoking three poets in a tone which unintentionally flatters and patronises:        Wordsworth who fills The stern mould of all Westmorland ...”

“... of C.S. Lewis’s distasteful Narnia series, in which a wardrobe gives onto an extraterrestrial wood. The central characters in Lewis’s religious fantasies are a lot of dead children – a motif we might have expected to find discarded by the 1950s. Kingsley, writing in 1862, had used it to better effect. Macdonald himself, in Lilith, invented a country ...”

“... Practically the first anecdote in his book recounts an attempt to get his under-age eldest son Christopher considered for a short-service commission in the Army. A mixture of barrack-room lawyer arguments and military name-dropping achieves his objective and Christopher gets onto the course which leads eventually, by way ...”

“... in his twenties, so it was natural enough for reviewers to notice the fact of his youth. The awful Christopher North patted the young poet on the head, praising ‘a promising plant’ while deploring an ‘infantile vanity’ (‘I forgave you all the blame,/Musty Christopher;/I could not forgive the praise,/Fusty ...”

“... Adam Phillips writes: Soon after I’d qualified as a child psychotherapist someone – I think Christopher Bollas – suggested that I should write to Frank Kermode about writing a Fontana Modern Master on Winnicott. This seemed to me an extraordinary idea. I had never wanted to be a writer, and this series of what were often rather remarkable books was ...”