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“... provost’s lodgings at King’s College, Cambridge, or in his last years, as provost of Eton. It may seem heartless or unsporting to deconstruct these little tales, for the author made no very exalted claim for them. ‘If any of them succeed in causing their readers to feel pleasantly uncomfortable when walking along a solitary road at nightfall, or sitting ...”

“... word in the text, and added a footnote on its ‘connotations’. But of course an editor may modernise without being insensitive, just as we may object to this instance without attacking modernisation per se. Similarly, modernised punctuation may be more or less sensitive to the ...”

“... past their limits as artists or actors or technicians, and made them propel their material, Richard Condon’s cheaply paranoid fantasy, past its limits.’ And part of the answer is to do with the power of that fantasy, the way in which The Manchurian Candidate links into the enduring pattern of paranoid politics in America. Despite its talk of ...”

“... covertly in his Memoirs (1991), there’s a feeling that Larkin’s poems, splendid though they may be, are in need of corrective piss-taking and don’t carry the weight that ‘any novel does’. After his death, in 1995, Amis took less of a battering than Larkin had. Martin Amis’s Experience (2000) softened the prevailing image of him as the meanest ...”

“... but transformed them. Above all, it turned social markers into political ones. That is Richard Wrigley’s contention in his fascinating study of the changing meaning of appearances from 1789 to the Napoleonic period. Right from the start, as the Revolutionaries tried to create an entirely new society, the vestimentary symbols of the Old Regime ...”

“... leader ‘to arrest all’ who had known about an assassination plot, ‘as well as all those who may have taken part’. A semi-autobiographical work, Men and the City, evoked the grim world of his rural upbringing in Tikrit, calling it ‘worse than the life of dogs’.Still, he made it to high school and then law school in Baghdad, before being recruited ...”

“... In the evenings, after dinner in hall, groups would take shape informally in the quad. There was Richard Cobb’s lot, making for the buttery and another round of worldly banter. There was this or that sodality, taking a cigarette break or killing time before revision. There was my own cohort, usually divided between the opposing tasks of selling the ...”

“... in me is dark Illumine, what is low raise and support; That to the height of this great argument I may assert eternal providence, And justify the ways of God to men. This invocation mirrors the opening of The Second Defence, where he describes how he ‘accepted, of those very deliverers of the country, and by general consent, the part spontaneously assigned ...”

“... as if subjecting the world to continual enquiry on this important issue. The sign ‘V’ may somehow hold together the dispersed elements of V, or it may not. The trajectory and the history of the V2 rockets in the seven-hundred-page fantasia of Gravity’s Rainbow promote, as ...”

“... assured I shall never demand it again, from any apprehension that hereafter the friendliness in it may be at variance with whatever feeling I please to entertain thirty years hence. Accordingly I set down with no sort of misgiving that I am, Dear Lady Olliffe, Yours very truly Robert Browning. This jeu d’esprit – which testifies nonetheless, in ...”

“... all be going to hell. That’ll answer them. Herbert has influenced poets from Henry Vaughan and Richard Crashaw to Dylan Thomas and Geoffrey Hill. And not only poets; reading Herbert has made converts, even in modern times. While reciting ‘Love (III)’, the famous last poem in The Temple, Simone Weil felt that ‘Christ himself descended and took ...”

“... be obliged to impose familiar patterns on the material, working according to inherited ideas which may well have eluded critical inspection. Only thus can he discern some sort of coherence in works that seem strange largely because they appear to have none. Historians are professionally prejudiced in favour of order; they cannot simply record chaos; sequences ...”

“... was born in 1900, and died in 1983. There can be argument over the exact date of its death. Some may maintain that it did not die until about 1990, others that electorally it died in 1980 or even earlier. There will be similar controversy over the role of Michael Foot: did he lead it to its death or did he just accompany it? Was he one of the physicians who ...”

“... that they’re growing. I think that they’re desperate.’ I heard about hope. I heard General Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, say: ‘I came away more positive than I’ve ever been. I think we’re getting some momentum built up.’ I heard about happiness. I heard Lieutenant General James Mattis say that ‘it’s a lot of fun to ...”

“... there is Oliver, his best friend but in many ways his opposite: louche, sexy, camp, cultured – Richard E. Grant to Stuart’s Paul McGann. Oliver teaches at an iffy language school off the Edgware Road. He is into opera, food, wine, the imperatives of good taste. He uses the word ‘crepuscular’ a lot, and speaks in a froth of polyglot ...”