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“... translation of Engels’s Dialectics of Nature appeared with an introduction by the geneticist J.B.S. Haldane, a close associate at Cambridge, the group felt that at last they had the theoretical tools they needed. Life could not be reduced to mere molecules, they argued, but neither was some non-materialist vital principle required to explain it. The ...”

“... The account of Daniel’s spell in the Isle of Man internment camp in 1940 is based on memoirs by Ronald Stent and Fred Uhlman, and includes a portrait of Kurt Schwitters. Here Smith is at her most Sebaldian: All round the room, balanced on broken lumps of wood, some on the broken-off legs of an old piano, are the greeny-blue-coloured sculptures of ...”

“... a Brecht musical’. Maturity is less glossy: he arrived at rehearsals for The Hard Problem in a green tweed jacket and orange socks.Stoppard has talked of putting on Englishness ‘like a coat’ when he arrived as an eight-year-old. A more sentimental biographer might have colluded in the suggestion that the coat could be shrugged off: that only underneath ...”

“... repeal. Gordon Brown advocates a new constitutional document ‘in parallel’, as the recent green paper puts it, with a bill of rights and duties. The Liberal Democrats advocate a convention-plus model. It’s worth considering first what the relationship of rights to responsibilities ought to be. Every right logically carries an obligation resting on ...”

“... most of it is. Even Jane Dunn finds it hard to tell things apart, at one stage mixing up Reggie Green-Wilkinson, White’s first husband, with the fictional version Archie Hughes-Follett as she relates the story of their wedding night (the same in both life and novel), when Antonia, having been warned by her mother that something so appalling was going to ...”

“... could imaginatively transform the hideous fir trees in front of the house into a purple, green and yellow Post-Impressionist painting.’ Spalding also writes of her own first impressions of Vanessa Bell’s early works. She was ‘stunned by their audacity’; she speaks of the abstracts ‘boldly but sensitively composed out of blocks of pure ...”

“... light tax regime, no limits on the interest rates and late fees creditors can charge, and a quick green light to home foreclosures for those whose payments are in arrears.‘It puts me in a precarious financial position when you fellows don’t pay,’ Joe Biden wrote to his tenants when he was a landlord in his mid-twenties. ‘To get right down to it, I ...”

“... months may seem an expressionist touch, but it corresponds to the conditions of life in Bowling Green, the town on which Purdy based it.Again Snyder hails the bravery involved: ‘The topic of same-sex love and desire was edgy for a novel published nine years before the Stonewall Inn protest. It was also risky, given the neglect and criticism Gore Vidal and ...”

“... at the Regency Hotel until the apartment was ready, and courted wealthy Jewish New Yorkers like Ronald Lauder, who introduced him to other millionaires, among them Donald Trump. Although not religious himself, he forged an alliance with the Lubavitcher leader Menachem Mendel Schneerson, who welcomed him at his Brooklyn residence and commanded him to ...”

“... there quickly as we could and, you know, everything was very calm and peaceful. England lay like a green carpet below me and the war seemed worlds away. I could see Tunbridge Wells and the sun glinting on the river, and I remembered that last weekend I’d spent there with Celia that summer of ’39.   Suddenly Jerry was coming at me out of a bank of ...”

“... to hide it. In a tweed jacket, with a moustache and cool good manners, he could be a stand-in for Ronald Colman. He’s made it, he’s settled; he has a wife, Madeleine, who lives down the peninsula. But she’s a remote figure in Elster’s life. On a rich leather chair in his antique office, and then later at his club, he tells Scottie he regrets the ...”

“... school. Selling Russian cars on the US market. I’m trying to get Bill Clinton involved in a green project converting waste to energy: a friend of a friend was at college with Hillary.’ Everyone you meet in Little Russia seems to have another business on the side. At the Cosmos party, doctors I talked to turned out to have a line in real estate; the ...”

“... Todd, to whom he is condemned to read aloud the works of Dickens in perpetuity. Waugh told Henry Green that the novel was about ‘a Gothic man in the hands of savages’ – savages both at home and abroad – ‘and the civilised man’s helpless plight among them’. It is the Black Mischief parallel effect again: the latter pages of the novel switch to ...”

“... foreign policy, they can coalesce to dictate its content. The end of the 1970s was such a moment. Ronald Reagan, a man with few peers at personifying and manipulating the key symbols of American political life, seized on it. For fifteen years history had been conspiring to give him the chance. Fear of falling apart? Only a Pangloss could have lived through ...”

“... pluck the fire-breathing young conservative (at Marquette he had displayed a photo of himself with Ronald Reagan in his dorm room) devoted himself entirely to Republican electoral politics. Here, too, he started out as a failure, running a doomed state legislative campaign in a mainly black, Democratic district of Milwaukee; he was trounced by 38 points. But ...”