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“... the dots into a coherent picture requires a broad brush and some pretty bold splashes of paint. Jonathan Culler’s Theory of the Lyric aims to show that Wellek was wrong, and that it is possible to make transhistorical claims about lyric. Culler is a veteran of the theory wars of the 1970s and 1980s, when he wrote what remain the clearest sympathetic ...”

“... of all international regulations.’After the Covid pandemic hit, the number of abandoned vessels rose sharply. In their 2020 filing to Companies House, the Mission to Seafarers, an Anglican charity, reported:One of our chaplains observed early in the crisis that among seafarers ‘there was a mental health epidemic paralleling the pandemic.’ Shore leave ...”

“... Like Edward Gibbon, that earlier master of narrative history, Jonathan Sumption went to Magdalen College, Oxford and stayed the course there longer and more successfully than his great predecessor. There are other points of comparison. Both left academia early for more public walks in life; Gibbon successively as squire, officer in the militia and Member of Parliament, Sumption for the Bar, where he became a leading QC ...”

“... to save Tinkerbell. The light swished from the back-cloth. For a moment the clapping continued, rose in volume, then died raggedly away, replaced by a tumult of weeping. W.C. Fields would be proud of her. Patrick O’Brian’s 13th story about Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin – appropriately called The Thirteen-Gun Salute – is as entertaining as its ...”

“... lid was clamped on nationalist aspirations. In 1848 patriotic rebellions broke out all over Italy. Jonathan Keates’s The Siege of Venice examines the longest-lived of the rebel states that came into being. With its broad view of the 1848 experience across Italy and its detailed account of political developments and divisions in Venice through the city’s 18 ...”

“... among the young, girls and women especially. In The Anxious Generation, the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt draws on an extensive range of evidence – rates of diagnosis, self-harm, suicide – to show the ways in which the mental health of young people has deteriorated. In the US between 2010 and 2018, self-reported anxiety ...”

“... The last time was in Paris when we were having supper at Brasserie Bofinger. Bacon and his party rose to leave, whereupon all the waiters gathered in the window to watch the great man depart – something I could never imagine happening in London.14 February. Watch the beginning of A Matter of Life and Death on BBC2, where David Niven, having survived his ...”

“... of Boeing 727s, set up and consolidated the Juárez cartel. Then the army arrived and the number rose. By the end of 2008, there were 1300 dead; in 2009, 2300; in 2010, 3800. The official explanation: the cartels, driven into a panic by the law and order offensive, were slaughtering each other, and 95 per cent of the victims were criminals. Yet it was ...”

“... plan – ‘We were the envy of the world,’ according to one Downing Street adviser quoted by Jonathan Calvert and George Arbuthnott in their excoriating Failures of State. Unfortunately, the reality was that the NHS had a chronic shortage of the necessary equipment and a plan that was reliant on exactly the kind of ‘just in time’ supply methods most ...”

“... published a week before the terrorist attacks, became a runaway bestseller, and the case against Jonathan Franzen and his kind of big social novel did not look so watertight. There may be something too wised-up about these novels, but interest in large-scale fiction has not fallen off after the attacks. Writers quickly settled back into familiar tracks; in ...”

“... by many chess prodigies. His trajectory was extraordinary. In a single year, his Elo rating rose from 904 – only slightly better than moving the pieces at random – to 1907, enough to be among Norway’s top four hundred or so players. When he was 12, his father requested a year’s leave of absence to take him on a chess-playing tour of ...”

“... When he wrote something ‘more perspicacious’ (i.e. leaked by Clark himself), Anderson rose in stature and became a guest at Clark’s Saltwood Castle and at the Beefsteak Club. Being impotent in office is ridiculous enough; reporting it is entirely trivial. Even papers like the Financial Times were used by Clark and ‘my old friend and stand-by ...”

“... they blow smoke rings of marijuana and praise the economic theories of Milton Friedman. ‘America rose and fell on the melodies of New Canaan’s songs about the economy. Songs sung by a Jewish economist and mimicked by Wasps who would have thought twice before playing golf with the guy.’ The wives meanwhile are listless and bored. Strung out on quack ...”

“... Chopping, who made a fortune designing the dust jackets for James Bond books, all drank in the Rose & Crown on the quayside at Wivenhoe. Constable condensed the dominant myth of the English countryside in his painting of a haywain standing in a cattle pond a little way to the north. When I arrived at Essex ten years ago to teach in the department of ...”

“... years on, HMS Pinafore is still afloat. Refitted and relaunched by directors like Joseph Papp, Jonathan Miller, Ken Russell and Mark Savage as post-copyright, post-D’Oyly Carte G&S, not only Pinafore, but The Pirates of Penzance, The Mikado and Princess Ida too have been successfully revived on both sides of the Atlantic. Showbusiness professionals now ...”