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“... Jimi Hendrix is alive. Lyndon Johnson is alive. James Jones is alive. Jim Morrison and Robert Penn Warren are alive. Richard Nixon is dead; and a Soviet-bloc skier named Ivana Trump – someone overhears Sixties psychic Jeanne Dixon saying – will assign her name to a novel she does not write with the full and worldwide backing of one of America’s largest ...”

“... the involuted relations between generations of Stracheys themselves. The younger ones, like most young people, found the older ones exasperating, thought them benighted about life in general and especially stupid about sex. Unlike most people, however, the young Stracheys extrapolated from their own experience, casting ...”

“... her betrayal. In 1841, when Baudelaire was twenty, Aupick, deciding he’d had enough of the young poet’s wilfulness and insolence, arranged for him to take a sea voyage to Calcutta. Charles’s ‘aberrations had caused cruel anguish to his poor mother’, Aupick explained in a letter to a friend justifying the exile. But like Hamlet, Baudelaire ...”

“... existence. The peak performer, of course, knows how to ‘get on’ with people. He can drink young white wine with the best of them in Palo Alto. But if he stands as the epitome of personal success, Garfield’s peak performer still lacks gravity. His relationship to society is instrumental at best. Freed from the ethical and political measures of ...”

“... could be more satisfactory to me than this.’ Despite Welty’s prompt adoption by Robert Penn Warren and the Southern Review crowd, the figure who emerges from Portor’s 1941 text is Austenish, ‘a quiet, tranquil-looking, modest girl’ who sits in a corner listening. Many years, honours, fellowships and prizes later, Paul Binding meets what is now the ...”

“... to decide how seriously he should take his themes. As leader of a group of expensively educated young men, Auden was protected against ‘all contact with serious critical standards’.The fact that Leavis offered the precise critical challenge didn’t mean that it was taken up in his terms, or indeed in any other terms. At a fairly early point, Auden ...”

“... the vanguard of the ‘Fight for 15’, the campaign for a $15 minimum wage. Like Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, who have also issued loud warnings about inequality, he is heir to a long tradition of social concern among the wealthy in the US. They have reason to be worried. The last time inequality reached comparable levels was shortly before the Wall ...”

“... a woman,’ he states. All his gifts of empathy come into play when he is talking of an imaginary young woman in Roubaix in 1917, looking at the sleeping Bavarian body beside her and the ‘Gott mit uns’ belt slung over the chair and brooding on the distance which is growing between them as the war turns against Germany; when he is guessing at all the ...”

“... to take a view that includes both. The 1780s were the years in which Burke’s crusade against Warren Hastings and the East India Company took shape – the occasion of so much of the ‘great melody’. After George III had destroyed the Fox-North ministry by rejecting Burke’s East India Bill, Burke must have seen the indictment of Hastings, of the ...”

“... birthday letter to Lay: ‘55 years old. Wow! That is really old. Thank goodness you have such a young, beautiful wife.’ Political links outside the US were also important, particularly in India, where Enron’s massively expensive Dabhol electricity generating plant, the first such privately owned project in the Subcontinent, was mired in controversy, and ...”

“... both were working for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), predecessor of the CIA. Both were young, separated by the war from their wives, and loved intelligence work. Both met, liked and became friends with Kim Philby, who was then working for the SIS. When Angleton and Scott met him, Philby had been a penetration agent for the Russians for a decade. He ...”

“... World War earned him a CBE. Both fathers were much loved, and both died suddenly at a relatively young age. Neither daughter received much in the way of formal education, but each took every available opportunity to educate herself. There the resemblances end. Warner’s stroke of luck was that her mother’s subsequent remarriage freed her to pursue an ...”

“... in his two great decades. Neither Leavis nor Empson was conspicuously successful in discovering young talent: during World War Two Empson was for a time passionately enthusiastic about the mild romantic verse of Sidney Keyes. In America, Wilson seems in later years to have sensed that the youthful Randall Jarrell might emulate his discernment of the ...”

“... This, and other evidence of fighting at close quarters, is dispassionately surveyed by columns of young fighters, dressed in tattered clothing and packing the standard Kalashnikov. Mid-morning and sunset bring the routine sound of Ethiopian shelling. The smell of fried bread and peppers wafts through the narrow warren of ...”

“... solution to the Irish problem. From the start they had little patience with what Warren Fisher, Head of the Civil Service between the wars, described as the ‘blackmail and bluff (oddly enough called loyalty)’ consistently deployed by the then Northern Ireland Government. Fisher prescribed a dose of reality for these ‘parochial ...”