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“... of Janiro’s head. The scene of physical violence is thus also a scene of emotional violence, a mark of La Motta’s distress. Afterwards he gloats: ‘No more pretty face.’ He doesn’t really know what he has been doing. Scorsese on Scorsese is enlightening not only about his use of violence. The text has been edited, sometimes with a strong hand, to ...”

“... finally got round to recognising the only physical hero of the story, a decent guy named Hugh Thompson who saw what was going on, landed his helicopter between Lieutenant Calley’s killing-squads and the remnant of the inhabitants, called for back-up and drew his sidearm. His citation had taken thirty years to come through. It was intended as part of the ...”

“... in his own eyes, to save the Labour Party even as the CPGB itself went under. These chapters mark a complete alteration of register. The difference begins from the very first page, in which – before even attempting to describe his own experience of Cambridge – Hobsbawm feels obliged to explain how little was his acquaintance with Burgess and ...”

“... are recounted in a series of boasts that his exploits exceeded those of Jim Morrison and Hunter Thompson, and admissions that his party friends, all of whom he renounces, were ripping him off, stealing his cash and credit cards before moving on to the next rich mark. This isn’t the whole story, but it’s more than ...”

“... on his ‘portable cassette player’. Typographical tricks suit satirists such as Hunter S. Thompson and Tom Wolfe, who seem to be graffiti-spraying billboards with impudent brio, deploying jazzy effects (italics, caps, boldface, exclamation marks, dashes) to fill a wide canvas. They’re performance artists in print. Pynchon, too. Moody is more of a ...”

“... In​ 2009, University College Dublin put on a conference for Alasdair MacIntyre to mark his eightieth birthday. The range of participants reflected the breadth of his interests: professional philosophers, social radicals (with a scattering of Marxists), Cardinal Cahal Daly and a coachload of Catholic students from Louvain ...”

“... get the job done.The example offered is Black Hawk Down (2001), a blockbuster based on a book by Mark Bowden about the near disastrous military operation that culminated in the hasty retreat of US forces from the centre of Mogadishu. Thomson tells us that he has felt compelled to watch the movie over and over again – a guilty pleasure – thanks to the ...”

“... in fact, for Miss Harrison’s soppy side: the Brownings, the Brontës, Alice Meynell, Francis Thompson, Tagore’s ‘King of the Dark Chamber’ and ‘The Post Office’. When Charlotte Mew found her individual voice, all these influences persisted, just as her school friends remained her first and last refuge throughout her life. With them, there was ...”

“... Economic History Review, and the Sixties saw controversy carried to new heights of fervour by E.P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class and by bodies such as the Institute of Economic Affairs. By the mid-Seventies Victorian values were becoming a political football. The Labour movement ‘came into being’, Michael Foot wrote in 1983, ‘to ...”

“... among the cognoscenti like a confederation of secret masters: Gerald Kersh, James Curtis, Mark Benney, Robert Westerby, Alexander Baron, John Lodwick, Jack Trevor Story. They have been struck from the canon, these technicians, these life-enhanced witnesses. They are noticed only by slumming journalists (who have built up their own collections of the ...”

“... bloody and fruitless’, he said. The first two predictions, at least, were on the mark. British support for the South stemmed from complex sources: nationalistic rivalry, relief that the brash upstart was receiving his comeuppance, admiration for ‘Southern honour’ and other Confederate pretensions to aristocratic values. Many English ...”

“... of the saving remnant on which the future of reading would depend. The photo on the cover of Denys Thompson’s The Leavises shows him in a jacket impermeable to the insults of time and with the open shirt of a Labour leader. He looks indeed, as his wife wrote of both of them, ‘grey-haired and worn down with battling for survival in a hostile ...”

“... 14 ‘enduring bases’, capable of housing 110,000 soldiers, and I heard Brigadier-General Mark Kimmitt call them ‘a blueprint for how we could operate in the Middle East’. I heard that the US was building what would be its largest embassy anywhere in the world. I heard that it would only be a matter of months before Starbucks and McDonald’s ...”

“... interactions with LaMDA, and the way they captivated him, reminded the technology journalist Clive Thompson of the 1990s craze for the Tamagotchi, the handheld device that behaves like a plaintive robot pet, endlessly demanding ‘food’ and ‘cleaning’, which its minder – anxious to please – can provide with the press of a button. The sociologist ...”