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“... Palevsky (computer software), Sol Price (big-box retailing), Barry Diller (mass media) and Bill Gates Sr (corporate law). It is a New Deal coalition (Irishmen, Anglos, Italians, Jews) updated with one African-American man, Bill Cosby, and one Asian-American woman, Yoko Ono. (The supporting cast includes a host of awkwardly renamed figures from American ...”

“... various modern scholars and writers, makes an impressive list. The best place to start – as David Stuttard does in his new biography – is family background. For all its democratic politics, Athenian society was intensely class-conscious. Although Alcibiades was a product of that complex network of upper-crust intermarried families which produced most ...”

“... has a telos: the fulfilment of the prophecy that the Messiah would be a descendant of the House of David. This precludes the pyrotechnic genealogical loops of the pagan gods, but it also illustrates the problem of genealogy more generally. Where to start and who to include? The Gospel of Luke takes the lineal patriarchal story back to Adam, which makes us all ...”

“... a couple of silly mistakes which Mr James and/or his proof-readers should have stopped. St Aid-gates for St Aldates twice on the same page (with St Aldates above them) is painful, and not just to Oxonians. Also what’s with Nuri Al Said? It was Nuri es Said in his late days. But overall, Mr James is fair, cool, straightforward and highly ...”

“... handling books. You see what’s not there. The Web makes millionaires (or billionaires, in Bill Gates’s case) early in life. By 1996, Amazon.com was offering visitors to its website a choice of 1.5 million titles. In late 1997 there are 2.5 million. This is not ‘stock’ in the traditional sense. Amazon.com does not ‘hold’ books. What it offers, via ...”

“... crisis of obesity, the topic has, as it were, ballooned. Forth’s book joins, among others, David and Fiona Haslam’s Fat, Gluttony and Sloth: Obesity in Literature, Art and Medicine (2009), Sander Gilman’s Obesity: The Biography (2010) and Calories and Corsets: A History of Dieting over 2000 Years by Louise Foxcroft (2011). All of these are ...”

“... been dismissed. In 1937 the Nazis staged the Degenerate Art exhibition in Munich. (Salomon, David Foenkinos imagines in his novel, ‘positions herself on the side of the despised artists’.) In 1938, she submitted a piece for an anonymous fine arts competition; having picked it as the winner, the jury panicked when they discovered it was by a Jewish ...”

“... a military tradition, founded in memory of the vanquisher of Bonaparte and cloistered by large gates and musty Berkshire woodland. But none of the private schools was hermetically sealed and ours included a small, influential coterie of boys, a year or two older than me, who were already restless. When they got wind of events in Paris they were obscurely ...”

“... suburbs that surrounded it and had taken on its name. Though they poured right up to the gates of Hanmouth, they were obviously the city’s, Barnstaple’s, suburbs, not Hanmouth’s. Hanmouth could never have suburbs.’ A whiff of mystery and potential horror is almost enough to override the genteel town’s distaste, at least for a while. There ...”

“... corrupted’ is a significant use of tense. In Kimball’s analysis, the enemy is within the gates; the damage has been done and undoing it will be a bloody business. ‘It is no secret,’ he tells us, ‘that the academic study of the humanities in this country is in a state of crisis. Proponents of deconstruction, feminist studies, and other ...”

“... the granaries of words like breasts’, ‘Who would have thought it? At the White Gates/She let them do whatever they liked’), or the customary brew of voyeurism and Catholicism:The white towelling bathrobeungirdled, the hair still wet,first coldness of the underbreastlike a ciborium in the ...”

“... with a glancing nod to Rilke, no caged old panther I, Pacing my madness. These muttered words Are gates, not bars, where only I can pass. The first edition of his translations appeared in 1943 when Hamburger was 19; in subsequent editions he has altered old translations, added new ones and repeatedly rewritten his introduction. The new edition, based ...”

“... Empire stretched from the Persian Gulf in the south to the Balkans in the north and reached the gates of Vienna in 1683. Then came the long ebb, as the Turks retreated from Europe and others competed to replace them. One power in particular had grown rapidly in importance. The small medieval principality of Muscovy had expanded hugely: Russia reached the ...”

“... undertakers hover in their closing pages), then at least from the crystal set to iPlayer. David Hendy’s book has the strengths of an insider’s account, packed with detail and anecdotes, shrewd in its assessment of personalities, light on socioeconomic change. Simon Potter’s is more academic and astringent. Potter tends to be critical where Hendy ...”

“... what Mr Hattersley thinks they ought to think), and in spite of a few ritual swipes at the SDP and David Owen, there is nothing in the book to preclude the idea of a Labour-Alliance coalition after the next election. But there is, in fact, one troublesome matter. Mr Hattersley denounces with passion and eloquence the appalling way that – despite the ...”