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“... worked to death). Let me try to put the point in my own words, knowing that I may well miss the mark. The American New Critics believed that it was the mark of literature to be ambiguous and paradoxical. ‘Soft’ deconstruction generalised this view to all writing, critical and philosophical as well as literary. By ...”

“... Mark Peel organises his serviceable authorised biography of Shirley Williams around an ostensible conundrum. Why didn’t Williams achieve more politically? Why did the polarising, hectoring Margaret Thatcher, rather than the consensus-seeking, appealing Williams, become Britain’s first woman prime minister? This is a common question ...”

“... who had ‘cracked the Tudor code’ was the botanist, horticulturalist and historian of gardening Mark Griffiths: his elaborately illustrated essay, ‘Face to Face with Shakespeare’, focused on John Gerard’s well-known Elizabethan manual of botany, The Herball or, General Historie of Plantes, and purported to demonstrate that one of the four seemingly ...”

“... successor to Aleister Crowley; had nearly interested John Betjeman in socialism and A.J.P. Taylor in incense. But he was one of those modernists who could only have been formed by an observance of tradition: he needed an anchor as much as he wanted a sailor. I only knew him at the fag-end of his career, when the passions had been banked down a bit. He ...”

“... the writings of an unlikely set of predecessors: Edmund Burke, the eccentric Jeffersonians John Taylor of Caroline and John Randolph of Roanoke, Old School Presbyterian defenders of slavery, T.S. Eliot, Karl Marx, Karl Barth, Reinhold Niebuhr, the Nashville Agrarians and their latterday apostles, Richard Weaver and Melvin Bradford. Liberals thus find ...”

“... yield of misty perceptions which are all we know of political reality. The philosopher Charles Taylor has remarked that politics is ‘what’s going on’, or something to that effect. But how the hell are we to know what’s going on, I thought while on my way to the Trades Union Congress? What is going on is in some part what we say is going on: but if ...”

“... little about them, I will say something. In Oxford, Jowett was opposed by a small group headed by Mark Pattison, who wished to see the place become a centre of real learning, as German universities were. From this circle came Ingram Bywater, as an undergraduate the close friend of Pater; he became an authority on Ancient philosophy, especially Aristotle, and ...”

“... physical traces: the scent of violets in the pantry; a pool of water by the window; a small round mark, like a cigarette burn, on the carpet. Others offer protection or bring gifts. In ‘Patricia Lake’, a friend describes a visitation from his long-dead mother, who appears one night in his Upper East Side apartment: ‘It had a platform bed and she was ...”

“... 4619), would probably count as one of Sandberg’s lean-backs for having quit her job as CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s corporate ghost-writer. The ease of Sandberg’s ascent does something light-headed to her feminism, just as Losse’s experience of being an English major in a company built around the late nights, taste for over-salty junk food and ...”

“... of shame about bodily functions’, to trace the rise of personal autonomy. She follows Charles Taylor, in his great philosophical history Sources of the Self, to elucidate the evolving 18th-century concept of ‘sympathy’. She also devotes a fascinating chapter to changing attitudes towards torture. Here she notes that ‘an almost complete turnabout in ...”

“... about the future, but about its disappearance – a ‘nostalgia for the future’, as the late Mark Fisher put it in Ghosts of My Life (a title taken from a song by the proto New Romantic group Japan).*In British pop, it was Bowie and Bryan Ferry of Roxy Music who came up with the idea that you weren’t just a singer acting out your life, or a fan ...”

“... for an ever-lengthening extension of the charter.The two sieges of Namur are also thought to mark a novelty of a different sort: throughout the desperate and bloody fighting, the government encouraged public interest in and support for the war. The sieges were a media circus. It was the birth of war tourism. As Macaulay points out, there were plenty of ...”

“... among the working populations of the industrial world. In 1909 the engineer Frederick Winslow Taylor introduced the principle of ‘time and motion’ studies to analyse labour productivity. The British psychologist William McDougall and the young W.H.R. Rivers devised laboratory tests to measure fatigue, which correlated with reduced hours of sleep and ...”

“... the distinction between verse and poetry, and, if we are to judge from his letter to Caroline Taylor of 9 December 1889, equally content to accept that his own place was below the salt: ‘I am not a poet and never shall be – but only a writer who varies fiction with verse.’ Almost a year later, Oscar Wilde recorded a similarly modest assessment of ...”

“... of my country and you’re not even Irish, you English cunt. You can stick it up your bollocks.’ Mark points out that ‘you’re not even Irish, you English cunt’ is like something out of Beckett. Andy wonders whether ‘you can stick it up your bollocks’ is an Irish expression or a stroke of inspiration on Keane’s part. Myself, I take a more ...”