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“... fiction’ but Brennan largely confirms its accuracy.Hilda, his mother, was ‘my closest and most intimate companion for the first 25 years of my life’. (The intensity of the attachment was due in part to Hilda’s loss of a baby boy the year before Edward was born.) Their relationship, Said wrote, had ‘shattering results for my later life as a man ...”

“... obtain political power, while the other exploited its political power to obtain vast wealth’, as Glenn Greenwald recently put it. Nothing could more clearly illustrate the merger of economic and political power in the oligarchy that dominates American public life. Were Clinton to win, her victory would ensure the continuation of business as usual in ...”

“... as if crossing an historical finishing line’. ‘Something Out There’ is one of Gordimer’s most radical stories. Today, its clear, exhilarated support for the militants could place her on the wrong side of the new UK law against the glorification of terrorism (though it was not banned under apartheid). According to Suresh Roberts, Gordimer’s advocacy ...”

“... and humanist aspirations, or between careerist plotting and disinterested service, or – perhaps most important – between the Enlightenment ideal of intellectual openness and the demands for secrecy made by the national security state.The history of nuclear weapons began in an atmosphere of creative ferment and international trade in ideas. This was the ...”

“... fugue will suddenly give way to a clear and lovely melody, flowing like water.I’ve always liked Glenn Gould’s characterisation, which he offered before a performance of the piano sonata known as the ‘Tempest’ (Op. 31 No. 2) – that inside Beethoven was a museum curator and a mad inventor, and that what makes his work so fascinating is that this ...”

“... too late, past the point where the saying of it might have been helpful. ‘Amy Foster’, the most desolate of his stories, is about a young man from Eastern Europe, shipwrecked off the English coast on his way to America, who ends up as the husband of the affectionate but inarticulate Amy Foster. The man remains a foreigner, never learns the ...”

“... give up, putting them in the position of the narrator of Thomas Bernhard’s The Loser, who hears Glenn Gould play and realises that although he is gifted enough as a performer to attend the same piano masterclass in Salzburg, there is simply no point in making any more efforts in that line. He gives away his Steinway the next day. It isn’t only the overtly ...”

“... to set his goons on anyone who ‘ever bothers you’. JFK told her she had a beautiful voice. Glenn Gould was a self-proclaimed ‘Streisand freak’. Streisand shrugged off the accolades: ‘I just thought it was bashert, as they say in Yiddish, which means “meant to be”. It felt as if I were simply fulfilling the vision that I had as a child.’In ...”

“... Conference last autumn. ‘More PCs, less PC.’ It’s not surprising that the government’s most committed culture warrior would use her speech to launch an attack on wokery. What’s strange is that anyone could think that the main problem with the British police is a surfeit of political correctness.Take the Metropolitan Police. In the last few ...”

“... moral bile like Britain’s Daily Mail or the Sun or the New York Post. These were big titles, but most cities and towns had a daily paper of some kind, with a mix of local and national and international news, comfortably financed by cover price and advertising. During the day, on the way to work, in the workplace, in the canteen, there would be news on the ...”

“... Marten’s estranged father, who had long since separated from her mother and seemed to have got most of his information from an article in the Independent, made a public statement calling for police to investigate ‘links’ between the couple’s disappearance and what happened in Nigeria: ‘These experiences appear to have been a trigger in so much of ...”

“... the organisation the previous July. She brought up the rape allegations and said they were ‘the most massive cliché’. ‘We expected flak from the Pentagon,’ she said, ‘but not smears based on two weeks in Sweden.’ She said it was bizarre what the Swedes considered to be rape but that some of her friends couldn’t believe she worked for ...”