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“... only a writer of very High Modernist tendencies would take this remark as a compliment, but Thomas Mann certainly did, and it wasn’t even addressed to him. He found it in Harry Levin’s little book on Joyce, which he read in 1944. He was also much drawn to another sentence in the same work: ‘The best writing of our contemporaries is not an act of ...”

“... At Thomas Hodgkin’s memorial service, in 1982, Christopher Hill, formerly Master of Balliol, used the pulpit of the college chapel to give an address entirely free of religious reference, quite a feat in view of Hodgkin’s Quaker roots and Hill’s status as historian of the Puritan revolution. ‘God was dead all right when you wrote that speech,’ I said to Hill afterwards ...”

“... during the darkest period of his mourning. The volume includes letters to Joseph Priestley, Thomas Lawrence, John Thelwall, Samuel Parr (‘the Whig Dr Johnson’), the great liberal advocate Thomas Erskine, R.B. Sheridan, Charles James Fox, the novelists and dramatists Elizabeth Inchbald, ...”

“... repeated, kept her in a glow for months. Down from Oxford (which gets three chapters) she joined Frank Pakenham, who had been her fellow undergraduate, giving educational lectures to the workers in the Potteries. Hitherto apolitical, she was sufficiently moved by conditions in the Five Towns to join the Labour Party. ...”

“... This duality, or ambivalence, of Freud’s has not always been noticed. For example, whereas Thomas Mann saw in Freud’s ‘unmasking of happening as really doing...the innermost core of psychoanalytic theory’, T.W. Mitchell, one of Freud’s earliest British supporters, saw him as ‘dominated by the prevailing urge to find mechanistic explanations ...”

“... freakshow’, who works for a fourth-rate detective agency disguised as a taxi firm. His boss, Frank Minna, then a small-time fence, recruited Lionel and three others from the St Vincent’s Home for Boys when they were teenagers, and predictably enough became a father-figure to them, even though he was only ten years or so older. He is murdered in the ...”

“... They are dangerous terms because they tempt us to lump writers like Muriel Spark and Alice Thomas Ellis together, especially when there are other alluring points of comparison, such as a characteristic tone which at first can seem no more than coolly ironic, and even – in these latest books – some clear similarities of plot (both novels touch on ...”

“... Lying together marks the end (one hopes) of a sequence of novels D.M. Thomas began in 1983 with Ararat. Now called in its entirety ‘Russian Nights’, the sequence has been a fluid thing. At various points Thomas projected a trilogy and a quartet. In the event, ‘Russian Nights’ has turned out to be five novels long ...”

“... with his novel Faggots. Fiction with homosexual content had trickled out through the century, from Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice to Gore Vidal’s The City and the Pillar to the work of Genet and Isherwood and Baldwin and Burroughs, but as each new novel or play or poem appeared it was treated as a one-off; if the work was a critical success it was despite ...”

“... problem. Empson went carefully into the question of Elizabethan Copernicanism. In 1576 Thomas Digges published a book by his father with an addition accepting Copernicus; it was often reprinted, though without alteration or further addition. Since Digges went on doing advanced astronomy, Empson took this continual reprinting of an unchanged text as ...”

“... they protect, it could be a forerunner to the far more radical global tax on capital proposed by Thomas Piketty as a way to ease the extremes of inequality built into the capitalist system. The idea goes back at least to Keynes. But the fact modern supporters chose to name it after the legendary hero of Sherwood Forest is a marker of how popular thinking ...”

“... a real historical personage) of the first great Polish chrestomathy, New Athens (from which Jacob Frank will learn his Polish), a chapbook of the most interesting thoughts and sayings of the past, to which he has decided to add the wisdom of the Jews, so far closed to him. The learned rabbi, Elisha Shorr, to whom Father Chmielowski proposes an exchange of ...”

“... the Independent Labour Party and the Communist Party; during the war he was, according to Nicklaus Thomas-Symonds, a ‘one-man opposition’ to the coalition government (Churchill called him a ‘squalid nuisance’). This didn’t dissuade Attlee from appointing him as minister of health (he also had responsibility for housing) in 1945. After resigning in ...”

“... whose guerrilla skills became a model for later insurgencies. Foden does not conceal his debt to Thomas Pakenham’s classic history, The Boer War (1979). A less skilful novelist might have been tempted to exaggerate the plight of Ladysmith, but Foden does not pretend that the town was ever at its last gasp, and agrees that it could have been held for ...”

“... Guggenheim on Central Park, another masterpiece of late modernist building-as-sculpture created by Frank Lloyd Wright in 1959, was suspended. But now the Metropolitan Museum has taken over the old Whitney for exhibitions of modern and contemporary art, and, at least for the time being, the building, renamed the Breuer, looks much as its architect conceived ...”