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“... past econometric work is meaningless. Surely, before consigning centuries of work to the ash pile, we should like to have some assurance that all our work is truly useless.’ At the start of the 1970s, interest in Lévy distributions in economics effectively evaporated. A Chicago PhD student, Robert Officer, examined empirically a key feature of ...”

“... painters of the early 19th, or of Thomas Eakins and Winslow Homer in the late 19th, or of the Ash Can School in turn of the century New York. Like those earlier Americans, they wanted to make the point that their themes were indigenous, not borrowed from the Old World. At the turn of the century, on the other hand, ...”

“... that with which we are born – was lost, just as the candle’s wick crumbled into ash when the moisture whose ultimate source was in the tallow or wax was burned off. When that happened, when the wick’s access to oily moisture was cut off, the ‘thread of life’ came to an end. Your life was longer or shorter for the same reasons that a ...”

“... his own ideas.’ The exact quotation, incidentally, comes from a letter Byron wrote to John Murray on 9 October 1820: Mr Keats whose poetry you enquire after – appears to me what I have already said; such writing is a sort of mental masturbation – he is always f – gg – g his Imagination. I don’t mean that he is indecent, but viciously ...”

“... remnants of disgusting meals (rice and tinned fish, rice and golden syrup). Halliwell rages, his ash blond wig sliding out of position, at an Orton who ignores him. Sirens can be heard, coming closer. Then comes a curious sentence: the spatiotemporal visitors leave the premises and head back to 2024, just as ‘the police barged their way in, as ever ...”

“... like it, and it’s all completely secret.’ We were joined by a man in his late twenties called John, with long curly hair and very blue eyes. He said: ‘Bush looked good today. He just talked to reporters at the White House and he was really on a roll. Speaking extemporaneously for a few minutes at a time. He’s good at that kind of back and forth. It ...”

“... I was hired​ as an assassin. You don’t bring in a 37-year-old woman to review John Updike in the year of our Lord 2019 unless you’re hoping to see blood on the ceiling. ‘Absolutely not,’ I said when first approached, because I knew I would try to read everything, and fail, and spend days trying to write an adequate description of his nostrils, and all I would be left with after months of standing tiptoe on the balance beam of objectivity and fair assessment would be a letter to the editor from some guy named Norbert accusing me of cutting off a great man’s dong in print ...”

“... liberalism’ that have been reiterated recently by public intellectuals such as Timothy Garton Ash, Michael Ignatieff and Leon Wieseltier. To hold his own against such adversaries, he suggests that he isn’t speaking solely for himself. Instead, he is giving recognition to the ‘millennial and post-millennial generations’ who find little in liberalism ...”

“... to Greece. Tony mentions in the poem her absent friends: George Devine, Ron Eyre, Tony Richardson, John and John (Dexter and Osborne), and at the conclusion a cake is brought in and Jocelyn is crowned with laurels. It could be thought pretentious but since Jocelyn is so far from pretentious it seems both fitting and moving.I ...”

“... presence of the female figures evoked in parts of The Waste Land, and more decisively in ‘Ash Wednesday’ and the Quartets. The central problem for Eliot comes down, I think, to this: how to give form to what for him is most resistant to it – female sexuality. ‘La Figlia che Piange’, written in 1911, when Eliot was 23, is a dramatisation of the ...”

“... because Kissinger had effectively brought the opinions of the South African Prime Minister, John Vorster, to bear on the issue (Meredith is particularly good at describing this), and because of sanctions. Economic sanctions against Rhodesia were in the end, and in their way, a success. They did not achieve what had been initially hoped for them, because ...”

“... dark grey suits (no pinstripes), blue plastic helmets, heavy-duty wellies and – apart from John Prescott – full zip millennial grins. Showcased by a long-focus lens that tactfully blurs the background of industrial dereliction. Britain is Working. Handson management. Optimism. Good humour. That stuff. A cross between a hobbled moon walk and Neil ...”

“... was hardly Simonides. H.D., meanwhile, was being courted by another young poet, the American John Cournos, to whom she wrote in 1916, ‘If love of me – absolute and terrible and hopeless love – is going to help you to write – then love me’; but she made clear that ‘the great and tender and bitter Greek love is beyond my love for you.’ In ...”

“... over the lingo of the church year, calculating Septuagesima, for instance (the third Sunday before Ash Wednesday); ecclesiological differences are teased out. Pym leans towards Anglo-Catholicism, the most conservative and ritualistic form of Anglicanism, and her congregations frequently enjoy ‘full Catholic privileges’, going to confession and attending ...”

“... compared him to the god Vulcan, ‘with his face, hair and beard covered and smeared with abundant ash and disgusting soot, with his thick and enormous hands and fingers always full of rust’. One of his great accomplishments was an astronomical clock, now lost, which took twenty years to design and which he inscribed: ‘QVI SIM SCIES SI PAR OPVS FACERE ...”