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“... but notes that there is no such churchyard there. It is the specifics that make our memories lodge so firmly, yet our brains are perfectly capable of conflating two lists or placing us in impossible landscapes. ‘My earliest memory is loitering in False Memory Lane, idling in blissful suspension on amniotic briny, constriction without fear, muffled ...”

“... political and financial scandal: the affair of the Banco Ambrosiano of Milan and the Masonic Lodge called Propaganda 2. Sindona, who during the Sixties and Seventies amassed a considerable private fortune (and a reputation for financial wizardry which earned him the American Club’s nomination for ‘Man of the Year’ in 1974) largely by laundering ...”

“... its extremely conventional make-up as an institution Princeton somehow managed to produce and even lodge occasional independents like Wilson and, shortly after the Second World War, R.P. Blackmur, the most eccentric and brilliant American literary critic of this century. I have never understood how Princeton actually got around to hiring Blackmur as professor ...”

“... without seeming to be interested – ‘in what crevices and crannies, one might ask, did they lodge, this maimed company of the halt and the blind?’ – and throwing out airy fabrications: ‘the peevish yet apologetic expression usual on the faces of the deformed’. She was better at seeing into things than looking at them.It is the far-sighted Jane ...”

“... This is a dystopian office novel played out in the field. Places like Sanctuary North are eco-lodge versions of Kafka’s Committee of Affairs, or the banal halls of the IRS in David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King – populated by Systems GuysTM and characterised by morbid bureaucracy. One small gripe is that Beauman ...”

“... letters of twenty pages or more, booze it up affectionately … They are joiners. They are a lodge.’ Vonnegut, too, was glancing backwards. By the 1970s SF was diversifying wildly out of the (white man’s) lodge, incorporating sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll. The field began, fitfully, to mate with other ...”

“... year to year in Exeter. I knew of his austere reputation and of his reluctance to publish from David Marquand, who was at Magdalen and who told me how he had been scared out of his wits one dark night in the cloisters when Bruce had swept past him in his Spanish cloak. I must have written to him and been told to come down to Magdalen, though I remember ...”

“... is the great unsolved problem of biology.’ Among philosophers, the most influential work was David Chalmers’s The Conscious Mind (1996): ‘Consciousness is the biggest mystery.’ Thomas Huxley wrote, 140 years ago: We class sensations along with emotions and volitions and thoughts, under the common head of states of consciousness. But what ...”

“... his offer of a Sweet Afton, and as I do so he notices my copy of Dean Godson’s biography of David Trimble, Himself Alone, lying in the back seat with David McDuff’s new translation of The Idiot and some other holiday books. When I say I want to write about Himself Alone, he exclaims: ‘A thick brick like that! I ...”

“... over his life and over his conduct as a leader of the Revolution, and what is soon evident about David Lawday’s spirited and highly readable biography is that he stands Danton in a flattering light and pays insufficient attention to movements in the shadows. ‘The Gentle Giant of Terror’, the subtitle calls him: which suggests, along with revolutionary ...”

“... happiness like pollen, which rubbed off. The pianist Harold Isaacs remembered overcrowded Acomb Lodge as ‘a very strange house’, adding enigmatically: ‘Essie knitted it.’ It was Essie who kept the show more or less on the road by managing the finances, while Harold taught pianoforte at the Royal Academy of Music. He had worked as an accompanist to ...”

“... as the major channel into this country for the theories of the European Enlightenment – or so David Watkin’s generous reading of Soane’s muddled (and, at the time, scarcely audible) Royal Academy lectures would suggest. These rival claims to Soane’s legacy are neatly captured, and subverted, in a cartoon currently on show in Sir John Soane’s ...”

“... diary might not be quite a classic, but it becomes one in the hands of its exemplary editor David Vaisey, who has trimmed it to not much more than a third of its original length, and richly supplemented its information about the village’s inhabitants and about Turner’s family and business. In this way he quietly helps to substantiate the observation ...”

“... out of the small worlds mapped in Eating people is wrong and The British Museum is falling down. David Lodge’s latest, Paradise News, crosses at least ten time zones from Rummidge, over the Pacific Rim, to Hawaii. Doctor Criminale clocks up fewer frequent-flyer miles, but short-hauls hectically. The narrative opens in London, flies to Vienna, boards ...”

“... thanks to propaganda campaigns spearheaded by Bullingdon Club toffs like Boris Johnson and David Cameron, underwent significant revision. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, when the horse path alongside the Regent’s Canal was mud, and forbidden to pedestrians and cyclists alike, I rode to my gardening job in Limehouse on a market wreck bought for ...”