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“... it is hardly to be denied that by one means or another he writes good criticism. The translator, Alan Sheridan, copes well with some difficult problems in the discussions of Proust’s language, though not all readers will know without more help what the joke about the name ‘Cambremers’ may be (page 248). Few contrasts ...”

“... Boz), and many busy others. Today, workers in British novels are often vague figures, thin on the page and ghosts in society. Alarm clocks, crowded tube trains, horrible bosses, lunch hours: the life of the average paid employee hardly gets a look-in, skilled labour being no match for expert stasis. We look to characters for their issues – their ...”

“... and Macaulay’s interpretation became standard wisdom in the 19th century. As late as 1979, Alan Downie could open his otherwise still quite useful book about propaganda and public opinion under Queen Anne with the cheerful observation that ‘in 1695, with the expiry of the Licensing Act, state censorship of the press ceased.’ Few historians or ...”

“... has a long history. Among the earliest ‘undesirable’ immigrants to the US, listed under the Page Act of 1875, were Chinese women suspected of being prostitutes. During debates over the British Nationality Act of 1948, which remained in force until 1983, it was argued by MPs in both major parties that alien women were entering the country ‘for immoral ...”

“... about the form of this book before I answer the question any further. The work opens with a split page: the beginning of an essay on Hobbes and the idea of the state, and below it, marked off by a slim horizontal line, a first-person narrative by the writer himself. The narrative recounts his meeting with the young woman who will become his typist. This ...”

“... in an age of religious wars, both hot and cold. It is this considerable challenge to which Alan Stewart responds in only the second biography of Philip Sidney in almost fifty years. Stewart draws on foreign archives, as well as on the Languet-Sidney correspondence and other letters secured by the private scholar James Osborn and published in his Young ...”

“... for whom even Lucifer and all his angels must be made to perform on cue. What makes the novels of Alan Sillitoe infinitely superior to this kind of journeyman’s work, is the abiding sense that the strong narrative line, though traditionally conceived and carried through, is at the same time a vehicle for allegory or, if that is too strong a word, anagogical ...”

“... are dead, and it looks as if there are no great philosophers left alive. At the end of his book, Alan Sheridan hesitantly stakes a claim for Foucault: ‘It is difficult to conceive of any thinker having, in the last quarter of our century, the influence that Nietzsche exercised over its first quarter. Yet Foucault’s achievement so far makes him a more ...”

“... as to deny that – at the time – all this must have been screamingly funny. On the printed page, I fear, it can seem dead and cold. I once asked Lady Mosley what she found so beguiling about Hitler’s conversation. ‘Oh, the jokes,’ she said at once. It is rather sad that these letters, read in bulk, might serve to confirm Harold Nicolson’s ...”

“... and a riot in a mine compound. And then he comes to the horrors of black-killing-black in Soweto, page after page of atrocity, a crescendo of horrors; there is blood everywhere – on everyone’s hands. Rian Malan is by now searching for a way to live in South Africa: searching for an alternative to Dawid the Younger’s ...”

“... In some parallel universe I like to think that Max Hastings and Paul Dacre and John Witherow and Alan Rusbridger behave like this. Dominic Lawson may well have said to Charles Moore in some gentleman’s outfitters what Sharon says to Georgina: ‘Well, we can’t both buy this, can we, babe? And I know who looks best in it.’ Both women, you see, are ...”

“... Britain. Oysters were right up there with the Times having no headlines, just adverts on the front page; with Marmite carefully imported and spread on your bread; with little girls’ dresses bearing a rectangle of smocking on the chest. ‘A noise annoys an oyster,’ we sang, ‘But a noisy noise annoys an oyster more.’ What was that? An old music-hall ...”

“... long poetic tribute to Karl Kraus in In Memoriam James Joyce was lifted wholesale from a TLS front-page article. Grieve furnished MacDiarmid with a childhood that drew several elements from other people’s books and lives. MacDiarmid remembered the marbles he had played as a boy, the ‘clay-davies, doolies, hard-hacks, mavies, cracksie-pigs, cullies’, but ...”

“... from ‘my memoirs team’. In one sense, however, it did not matter who actually wrote what, page by page or paragraph by paragraph. No more than Churchill did Thatcher draft every word published in her name. Yet The Downing Street Years was created by a team whom she superintended and by methods similar to those which ...”

“... of curates and Edwardian ladies; prisoners of conscience; Anaïs Nin; Richard Crossman; Tony Benn; Alan Bennett. But on the whole, no. And yet we can’t stop ourselves. These days, if you’re a young writer and you don’t do your own weblog you’re something of an exception, and even for the amateur, the ‘journaler’, there’s now a whole industry ...”