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“... replaced by the sauve qui peut mentality best epitomised, for me, in a wonderful game called ‘So long, Sucker’, invented by four economists in 1964; the object of this game for four players is to get someone to go into partnership with you and then double-cross them.Though these books have not (yet) been burnt, they have gone underground: a new plaincover ...”

“... Hamilton wrote that Mew’s reputation ‘hangs by a thread’. Her Collected Poems and Prose has long been out of print and there are no critical books devoted to her writing.I’m not sure she would have minded. Reading essays that seek to rehabilitate or to ‘make a case’ for Mew, I sometimes hear the ghost of one of her speakers, ‘The ...”

“... but their eventual use is more closely controlled by non-scientific authorities than ever. Long ago, when all research was done on a shoestring, anyway, scientists who were directly employed by the government, along with industrial research workers, had a very inferior status in the scientific community. Authority was firmly in the hands of the ...”

“... as was not wearing a vest or drinking unaired water.TB was pretty well eradicated or controlled long before my mother’s death, but she never ceased to think of it as the killer it had been in her youth. Always one to diddle her hands under the tap, she would have found the precautions against the coronavirus only common sense.18 March. The York Theatre ...”

“... constrained to endorse whatever policies they already wish to pursue. Yet more serious is the long-term psychological damage inflicted by such forms of self-censorship. As Tacitus bitterly emphasises, servitude inevitably breeds servility. When a whole nation is inhibited from exercising its highest talents and virtues, these qualities will begin to ...”

“... looking at incessantly, watching, gazing, repeatedly looking at, continuously observing for a long time. The inflections are much less reminiscent of English than of languages in which verbs are inflected to express a great many different aspects. Sign doesn’t have passive and active verb forms, but passivity and agency in action are readily ...”

“... that the English version tastes like jellied flowers dusted in soap powder?What else did I long for as a child? I wanted action. I wanted characters brought right to the very edge of themselves. To put a child character in danger is in a way to honour them – to believe in their capacity to rise to meet it – and the child reader, in their ...”

“... account of a dinner with McGeorge Bundy:I have never admired anyone so much, so intensely, for so long as I did him during those four hours ... his character emerged in such exquisite form that I am now his devoted and dedicated slave. I like him very much indeed, and I think he likes me, now, which was not always the case.Looking back on the fantastic ...”

“... or nearly so.’ He was, as always, divided.Aldous’s first published piece of fiction was a long short story, ‘The Farcical History of Richard Greenow’ (collected as the first story in Limbo, 1920). It opens with the Greenow children being showered with presents by their rich Aunt Loo – a woman with an immense bosom and high ideals. These gifts ...”

“... than the shrill whistle and frantic puffing of the banking engines which helped to haul the long trains up the gradient from Monmouth Road station to the Junction and on to Llanvihangel. This was the line the schoolboy would take home every day, up the steep incline to Pandy, on trains passed through on the authority of his father’s signal ...”

“... thing to do is in a socially ‘edited’ world. On that terrible adjective we may pause for a long time. It throws the clearest and coldest beam of its presiding author’s mind, and perhaps her final capital judgment on those cool conventions, those prophylactic artifices, with which, with the best of intentions, every organised society devitalises the ...”

“... were intensified by being starkly lit or shadowed: The camera here loves deep perspectives, long rooms, rooms seen through doors and giving onto rooms through other doors, rooms lengthened out by low ceilings or made immense by high-angle shots where the ceiling seems to be the sky. Figures are widely spaced down this perspective, moving far off at ...”

“... theory of natural selection: it is a book, a magnificent theatre of persuasion, ‘one long argument’ (as Darwin called it), supported by masses of arduously compiled evidence, ingeniously organised and vouched for by a special individual, with known special virtues and capacities. (Historical reactions differed even on the recognition of the ...”

“... time the island has given notice to Europe. The first brief and bloody, the second powerful and long-lasting, the third stupid and calamitous. A Dutch marine officer in the Roman forces called M. Mausaeus Carausius tried it in 286. He proclaimed himself emperor, beat off imperial expeditions crossing the Channel and struck a great many silver and copper ...”