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“... beyond the thinkable. That is where Jessie is living or lying crumpled in death, and if we were wise we would leave her there. But we have only to hear the word ‘unthinkable’ to start thinking – that’s what the word is for – and all kinds of novelists and philosophers will remind us that Wittgenstein’s excellent advice (‘Whereof one cannot ...”

“... weren’t a young man’s poems, they weren’t even new poems, they were old poems: generalising, wise, consensual, to coin a word, veritudinous. In one of the Bollingen volumes, the indulgent and intellectualist Broch wrote in that mid-century Eliotic way of the poems’ ‘suppression of self’. Indeed, their experiential component was close to zero: they ...”

“... of the man who had harried and harassed her husband and snubbed her. The Spearses had a son, Michael, a permanent invalid, and, at this time, an undergraduate at Oxford. At Christmas 1939, his plans having gone wrong, de Gaulle was welcomed at the Spears home in Berkshire. He and Michael Spears had a long talk, just ...”

“... with their knowledge of current affairs and hone their interview techniques. ‘I like that Michael Howard,’ says one. ‘And Kenneth Clarke’s a good bloke too.’ Neither boy, I suppose, has ever known anything but a Tory government nor by the sound of it ever wants to. At Birmingham I have a session with David Edgar’s playwrights’ class, then ...”

“... it was government policy. We should remember who those backbenchers were: Norman Tebbit and Michael Heseltine. It seems fair to say that neither they nor the hundred or so Conservative MPs who supported their amendment had any clear notion of what the ILEA was obliged to do; nor again, it seems fair to say, did they care. Mr Tebbit and Mr Heseltine were ...”

“... his companion, is clearly the genius of the place, physically perfect, devastatingly honest, wise beyond all acquired wisdom. These two parfit gentil knights try to make sense of the old order which has disappeared and the new one which has replaced it. Tully, who has taken possession of Avalon, spends his time sculpting a marble cherub; when mixing with ...”

“... that out is only the start of an immense process of comparison and collation, manageable (as Michael Reeve wryly remarked 17 years ago) only under ideal conditions unlikely ever to be fulfilled. That said, Reeve’s new text, a collation of 11 of the most important manuscripts, is probably the best we’ve had since Geoffrey put his pen down, and it ...”

“... by revisionist historians.* Harris is portrayed in it without criticism – indeed, as a kind of wise and benign Providence who gives the brilliant boffin, Barnes Wallis, the chance to realise his revolutionary idea for a bouncing bomb with which to shatter the Ruhr dams. The entire film is saturated in an archaic and class-ridden ideology of ...”

“... are as individual and recognisable as that of, say, D.H. Lawrence, and, it might be argued, as wise and valuable in thought, though richer in entertainment.’ This strikes me as nonsense. Here is the voice of that novel (and such stuff can be found all over at least the first half of his oeuvre): The precipitous small hills that rise about Arthur’s ...”

“... the beginning of ‘Arches’, the speaker recognises or discerns nothing; by the end, he sounds wise. Not just that, he seems to be under very low pressure. There is painfully little forward momentum. Most rhetoric is based on repetition: Schuyler uses repetition that is only repetition, that is without rhetoric. The title – ironically – falls into the ...”

“... necessary, since most of the politicians looked like T.S. Eliot and most of the poets looked like Michael Foot – with Mary Wilson as one of the exceptions. Although I warned the heroine of Mrs Wilson’s Diary that I was a journalist, she favoured me with her political opinions (sound, I thought, if unorthodox) and I changed the subject, asking if she ...”

“... dad, he lacks colour and substance, and his moral rectitude is apt to come across as prim and wise before its time. Hassan Omar’s personality is formed in reaction to a world governed by brutal, exploitative and capricious men. Being himself a man, he can fight back and he is expected to do so. The ones who really suffer are the women, as Marjorie ...”

“... was late to take an interest. There are no druids in Shakespeare, not even in Cymbeline. Michael Drayton repeatedly mentions them, but uses both the ‘horrid sacrificer’ and ‘wise philosopher’ images impartially. Milton seems to have first welcomed them as sagacious fellow poets, but then either caught up ...”

“... their heads and complained of the ‘bad Bengali’ – ‘the language does not taste well.’ Michael Datta (Madhusudan Datta, 1824-73), who took the name ‘Michael’ on his conversion to Christianity, was highly regarded as an innovator in Bengali blank verse and for his elevated Miltonic style. But he was never a ...”

“... to All Quiet on the Western Front. But he died in 1970, leaving it unfinished: a massive stub. Michael Hofmann, his translator, recalls some other unfinished fictions. But this is not The Mystery of Edwin Drood or The Man without Qualities. Those two books lack their ends, but what remains doesn’t feel raw or rough; they simply break off. The Promised ...”