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“... wonderful bucolic address, backed up by a traditional railway pub and a vine-draped cottage out of Thomas Hardy. The cottage and the titular angel path would be illegally obliterated, with posthumous apologies, at the great Olympic moment in 2012. Chobham Farm workers, soon to be picketed by the dockers whose territory they were invading, were paid, by ...”

“... Bowen (in Cass’s terminology, Person R), who carried out the original post-mortem, and Professor Keith Mant, who carried out a subsequent examination on behalf of the family, agreed on this. Mant noted that the blow had split Peach’s skull but not his skin and argued that a blow from a truncheon would probably have split the skin. There had been one heavy ...”

“... don’t see why not.’ So while​ this is certainly a ‘literature of power’, in the terms of Thomas De Quincey, it is also ‘a literature of knowledge’. You either will or won’t recognise the references to Brueghel’s painting Dulle Griet, say, or Holbein’s Dance of Death, or Brecht’s 1940 radio play The Trial of Lucullus, or John Arthos’s ...”

“... like a pious fish – and then we were up on our feet, and were singing ‘O Nata Lux’ by Thomas Tallis1. I knew the piece but hadn’t really listened to it. Now I was struck – assaulted, thrown – by its utter beauty: the soft equanimity of its articulation, like the voice of justice; the sweet dissonance, welcome as pain. That dissonance, with ...”

“... in the pyramid gave entry to a network of underground tunnels. The fabled Chinese Limehouse of Thomas Burke and Sax Rohmer, of Oscar Wilde’s opium dens, has long gone. And now the Good Friends restaurant in Salmon Lane, to which hungry diners travelled from all over the city, has followed them: converted into a store for building supplies. The spirit of ...”

“... the following textual emendation:From Zeno to Spinoza, from the Gnostics to Leibniz, from Thomas Hobbes to Lenin and Freud, the battle-cry has been essentially the same; the object of knowledge and the methods of discovery have often been violently opposed, but that reality is knowable, and that knowledge and only knowledge liberates, and absolute ...”

“... and serious specimens of romance as Ray Bradbury’s short story ‘A Sound of Thunder’ or Keith Roberts’s sequence Pavane – both of which may have given him ideas – then the difference comes from the degree of intellectual self-consistency. Amis writes with a kind of working self-knowledge that brings him closer to the earlier and classic ...”

“... which, not being especially carnivorous, we find it hard to dispose of. This year, though, Inigo Thomas, having been brought up on such fare, has offered to take them off our hands (and later sends round a brace in a delicious casserole).7 February. Nick H. rings this morning to say they’d been talking over the play at the theatre and the general feeling ...”

“... But the three officers connected with these documents – Vernon Attwell, John Donaldson and Thomas Style – had signed witness statements in December 1974 stating that the manuscript notes were contemporaneous, and they had repeated this on oath in the trial in 1975. If the rough typed notes were indeed a draft from which the manuscript notes were ...”

“... 80p’) reminded me of Martin Amis’s London Fields, with its darts-addicted ne’er-do-well, Keith Talent. ‘Really, the thing about life here,’ the narrator says of the Black Cross, the pub in the book, ‘was its incredible rapidity, with people growing up and getting old in the space of a single week … Guy always thought it was life he was ...”