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“... new recruits, he recalled, there was a strong feeling that people ‘like the deposed King and Mrs Simpson’ had deceived the public about Nazism, encouraging them to see it as a bulwark against Bolshevism and depicting the greatest evil as another war with Germany. This naturally led to a counter, pro-Russian feeling, which has since been ...”

“... a limit to their analytical interest in the sport. Thinking gets you caught from behind, O.J. Simpson said, talking about American football, the sport he used to be famous for. Athletes don’t necessarily want to understand what’s going on, they want to think the kinds of thought that allow them to succeed – and there’s a big difference between the ...”

“... give at short notice ‘a small dinner for about 120’). The talk was all about the king and Mrs Simpson, with few of those present believing that Edward would abdicate to marry her. On 3 December the news of the abdication broke. For Channon, Edward ‘could not have more clumsily mismanaged his affairs; he had only to lie, to prevaricate until after the ...”

“... for its clientele: Humphrey Bogart! Marlene Dietrich! Fred Astaire! The Duke of Windsor and Mrs Simpson! Each customer was measured, and the findings entered in a series of ledgers known as the ‘Feet Books’; the bespoke shoemakers then modelled wooden lasts to be used to make the shoes; these effigies were labelled with the client’s personal number ...”

“... the author of The Logic of Political Economy, an exposition of the ideas of David Ricardo, which John Stuart Mill, for one, thought ‘very successful’. He wouldn’t have needed to owe rent on multiple rooms and houses, had it not been that the landlords held his drafts and papers hostage as collateral for his debts. Things improved steadily when his ...”

“... one with the sense of humour who can laugh at the mind’s absurdities. But he’s also the Bart Simpson of the psyche, always ready with excuses, extenuations and disclaimers: ‘It wasn’t me, you didn’t see me, and in any case you can’t prove it.’ Most of the time we do not pay much attention to the split between ‘I myself’ and ‘my ...”

“... in his own day could be accounted Powell’s leading champion. In a front-page spread in the TLS, John Bayley hailed him under the banner of ‘A Family and Its Fictions’. There was a conflict in Powell, he explained, between the Gothic and Gallic sides of his imagination, which lent much of the richness to his work – provided the former, with its better ...”

“... punishment in the United States subsists – inescapably – in a miasma of race. The Honorable John H. Land in 1977 presided over the trial of a black man called William Brooks, whose case McFeely follows. Land is the son of a prominent local dignitary who had seen to the lynching of an adolescent boy 65 years earlier. The barefoot ‘little black ...”

“... asked to give his views on this and that. Thus we would have a ‘Letter from America’ by Louis Simpson or some such. So the Review had become more magazine-y than polemical. Something had gone, some genuineness, some verve. Some energy and commitment. It was time to jack it in. That would have been 1971 or 1972. Then I went to America for a year. No. It ...”

“... in the county were killed for want of fodder. By the end of winter in this period, according to John Higgs’s The Land (1964), every blade of grass had been eaten and the animals were forced to follow the plough looking for upturned roots.The social structure of the country had changed, the population had grown, the plough had been improved, the threshing ...”

“... unsmiling Sir Kevin. ‘Norman is so cheeky. Now we’ve read Dylan Thomas, haven’t we, and some John Cowper Powys. And Jan Morris we’ve read. But who else is there?’ ‘You could try Kilvert, maam,’ said Norman. ‘Who’s he?’ ‘A vicar, maam. Nineteenth century. Lived on the Welsh borders and wrote a diary. Fond of little girls.’ ‘Oh,’ said ...”