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“... After Kinship (2004), Janet Carsten considered the legacy of the thesis put forward by Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities, and addressed some of its unanswered questions. ‘Why is it that the nation exercises such an extraordinary emotional appeal over its citizens? Why ... are people prepared to lay down their lives for their country?’ Some of ...”

“... group coalescing around the New Left Review, and by 1965 was on its editorial board under Perry Anderson. While their elders on the left – the generation of E.P. Thompson and Christopher Hill – had planted radical politics in the soil of English history, the new cohort had more cosmopolitan ambitions. They looked abroad, especially to the Continent and ...”

“... motor car. If my orders were not obeyed, I would open fire immediately.’ After a bit, Sergeant Anderson, General Dyer’s personal bodyguard, ‘noticed that Captain Briggs was drawing up his face as if in pain, and was plucking at the general’s elbow. Mr Plomer, deputy superintendent of police, told the general during a lull that he had taught the crowd ...”

“... literary renaissance its name). Most important, ‘in the early winter of 1918 I met Willa Anderson ... My marriage was the most fortunate event in my life.’Willa’s background was very different. Her parents came from Unst, the most northerly of the Shetland Islands, but she was brought up on the mainland, in Montrose, and was a prize-winning ...”

“... by a downed weather balloon. It wasn’t until 1994, more than a decade after Charles Berlitz and William Moore’s book The Roswell Incident (1980) had spawned a new generation of conspiracy theories, that the Clinton administration fessed up: the crash was related to a secret surveillance programme, in which balloons had been equipped with listening devices ...”

“... the classes did not exist.’ Set against the fierce muckraking of Theodore Dreiser or Sherwood Anderson, another critic complained, Cather’s fiction was ‘harmless stuff that “could be read in schools and women’s clubs”’. Her Flaubertian classicism (and concomitant moral irony) went mostly unrecognised, and despite her huge popularity with ...”

“... limed oak. It was this house where Eric Korn heard someone reading out the plaque as being to ‘William Butler Yeast’. ‘Presumably,’ Eric wanted to say, ‘him responsible for the Easter Rising.’ 17 February. Stopped by a man outside the post office in Regents Park Road who fishes in his wallet and shows me a note I sent nearly 50 years ago to ...”

“... other sources of company revenue: taxes on gambling, sex work and cock-fighting. His deputy, William Farquhar (Justin Trudeau’s great-great-great-great-great grandfather), resented Raffles’s evangelism, and in post-Raffles Singapore (he returned to England in 1823), traditional company practices resumed. The free port’s success was immense. In the ...”

“... one of those who care a great deal for the writers of Eastern Europe, and the experiments of William Carlos Williams and the Beats. I’d first met him when I was a student myself, in the Eighties, when travelling across America by car seemed like the right sort of thing to be doing. There was a gang of us then, and we got jobs working in pizza places or ...”

“... behaviour below. The star of that film, Keanu Reeves, also appears in The Matrix (1999) as Thomas Anderson, a.k.a. Neo, a company man turned hacker turned messiah. At the film’s conclusion, Neo phones in a proclamation of defiance from a booth on a busy street in the virtual world into which the bulk of the human species has been absorbed, before stepping ...”

“... environment. Our ‘pleasure cycles’ are now tied to the web, the literary critic Sam Anderson claimed in a 2009 cover story in New York magazine, ‘In Defense of Distraction’. ‘It’s too late,’ he declared, ‘to just retreat to a quieter time.’ This sort of ‘outré posturing’ by intellectuals rankles with Carr since, he thinks, it ...”

“... it up, just go out there and kill Soviets.’ These orders came from a most peculiar American. William Casey, the CIA’s director from January 1981 to January 1987, was a Catholic Knight of Malta educated by Jesuits. Statues of the Virgin Mary filled his mansion, called ‘Maryknoll’, on Long Island. He attended mass daily and urged Christianity on ...”

“... point of all discussion, was inculcated by 19th-century Orientalists: the translator and scholar William Jones called Kalidasa, the greatest Indian poet and dramatist of antiquity, the ‘Shakespeare of the East’. To do this, Jones had to reverse history – Kalidasa preceded Shakespeare by more than a thousand years. Jones is not so much making a useful ...”

“... issues. Nobody points this out, least of all to her.18 April. A 70th-birthday party for Lindsay Anderson in St Mary’s Church Hall, Paddington. Lindsay in one of his presents, a silk dressing-gown (‘I’m wearing it to show that I am quite happy to direct Noël Coward if asked’). A wheelchair has been provided for a 90-year-old guest who hasn’t ...”

“... of Michaelmas daisies, and grey-blue pools of agapanthus lilies.It’s like a scene from a Wes Anderson film. You are immersed in one set of details until your eye is drawn by a sudden shift in focus to what lies beyond or slightly outside the frame. The serpents, the flesh-eating dahlias, and above all the artificiality of the tableau foreshadow the ...”