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“... historical and social circumstances within which many of its impulses and problems were formed. Michael Meyer’s long and interesting biography has much less of this quality, though its sustained narrative offers a good deal of the information. At its centre is an understandable emphasis on Strindberg as dramatist; his fiction and other prose are treated ...”

“... in Britain, where, as a South African, he is banned from TV, but bigger than Springsteen or Michael Jackson in France). What would Danton have thought of the Revolution being commemorated by a left-wing South African singing Zulu rock in the South Pacific? Perhaps it’s best we don’t know. One longs, at times, for the more considered attitude of Mao ...”

“... reader will divide the work with him and share the spoils. In this partnership we become lucid and wise. Even the most unlikely circumstances are arranged for our self-satisfaction. In War and Peace Tolstoy goes so far as to make self-satisfaction the key not only to the reader’s enjoyment but to the satisfactory discharge of living in general. In Conrad’s ...”

“... Europe, and its fecundity’. He examines The Adventures of Augie March, The Crying of Lot 49 and Wise Blood, books ‘in which the new authority of unmarked, universal man could be borrowed and spread, and yet where its contradictions and gaps would come into relief’. His analysis of Invisible Man is particularly original. And ending his philosophical ...”

“... God ... I’ve been saved from that ... so far.’ This is interpreted as meaning that he was a wise (or anxious) virgin, remaining so until he was 23. But nothing in his writing suggests he was glad of it. What he had been saved from was not sex, but sex as entrapment, and he saw Neville finally trapped. By 1920 he could look back on this in a sardonic ...”

“... are there, including John Ford, Rouben Mamoulian, Robert Mulligan, George Stevens, Robert Wise, William Wyler, Billy Wilder. Hitchcock sits next to Buñuel, says very little, then at one point puts an arm round his companion’s shoulder and says with deep admiration: ‘Buñuel, that wooden leg in Tristana. That wooden leg.’Buñuel and his wife ...”

“... managed to reveal quite so many things that the [British] government wanted kept secret,’ writes Michael Goodman of the Department of War Studies at King’s College London. And yet Pincher believes he never threatened the security of the state – that would be the work of a traitor, which is the way he described Snowden in a recent television ...”

“... Admiral Horthy to Szalasi in Hungary and Marshal Antonescu to the Legion of the Archangel Michael in Romania. Vidkun Quisling, the Norwegian pro-Nazi whose name became a synonym for collaborationism, was excluded from power for most of the first 22 months of German occupation. Hitler sensibly preferred to rule through influential local notables rather ...”

“... not deterred the blurb-writers or big-name eulogists. Among the extreme claims made on his behalf, Michael Hofmann’s recent hailing of Brodsky as the true successor to Robert Lowell and great American poet of our age has at least the virtue of unambivalence. We may not agree with it, but the terms are clear. Hitherto, through no fault of his own, the poet ...”

“... of kill-or-be-killed. League teams, on the other hand, are those which know how to deliver, points-wise, on a weekly basis. Cup teams win ‘famous victories’; League teams ‘grind out results’. Chelsea and Middlesbrough are, assuredly, cup teams. Even in the Cup, though, they have each enjoyed leaving too much to chance. For instance, neither would be in ...”

“... was thirteen, she heard a voice from God, which she eventually identified as that of the archangel Michael. The voice told her that ‘her mission was to lead the dauphin to Reims to be crowned,’ according to royal tradition. Before that, it was her duty to break the English siege of Orléans. By the time she gained access to the dauphin he must have been ...”

“... since hardly anybody believes it. (Consider the grotesque recent headline on the subject of Michael Heseltine’s political advisers: ‘THE ADULTERER, THE BUNGLER AND THE JOKER’.) This misses the point. Say that only one person in ten gives any credence to the Sun’s urgings: while the paper is being read by about twelve million people a day (four ...”

“... little time for the activities of his mother. Another investigation of the Queen of Scots, that by Michael Lynch and his team, is not aimed at the general reader, for it assumes a firm grasp of the main events of her life. It explores areas of less common interest: her court, her library, her use of her French jointure, her policy towards the house of ...”

“... surveys of books that are unjustly out of print. And Sacheverell still holds his surprise niche in Michael Roberts’s classic Faber Book of Modern Verse. Sachie is also valued as the prince of self-help publishing: according to the Oxford Companion to English Verse, between 1972 and 1978 he ‘privately printed’ no fewer than 43 collections of his ...”

“... creating an emergency in which his true ‘nature’ will reveal itself. It is worth saying (and Michael Moorcock, the chief focus of Greenland’s study, was evidently never tired of saying it) that Science Fiction hoists itself up from the general mass of popular literature only by a positive effort of style. Beside Stanislaw Lem, an Old Master in this ...”