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“... of Advanced Study in Princeton. There Heidegger spends two years slowly and painfully learning English, aching for the chance once again to spellbind seminar rooms full of worshipfully attentive students. He gets a chance to do so in 1937 when some of his fellow émigrés arrange a permanent job for him at the University of Chicago. There he meets ...”

“... philosophy, too, was dead. After Russell, he was the last person who could, at any rate within the English-speaking world, make philosophy accessible to a general audience: from now onwards, it has condemned itself to be a hermetic subject. Today England seems to me so fundamentally backward-looking in its attitudes that it cannot celebrate any event unless it ...”

“... His chance to shine lures him away from his sound business and his devoted Irish wife, into an English marriage, a contract with the BBC, and two decades of the fame for which he insatiably hungers, as a folk-hero who puts down the mighty and is adoringly recognised in the street. When his English wife dies, she provides ...”

“... whose retellings of native ghost stories have made him more famous in Japanese translation than in English. The most interesting writing has been in sketches by those who have passed by and peered in without ever achieving intimacy with the culture: Angela Carter’s essays of the early 1970s collected in Nothing Sacred; Anthony Thwaite’s delicate and ...”

“... Bellow, his then wife Sondra, and Sondra’s lover Jack Ludwig, also a member of the Bard English Department. Mustn’t there be, it was suggested, some ‘homosexual component’ – Atlas probably wants to say ‘homosocial’ – in the relationship between the two men? To explain this sort of arrangement, he might relevantly have mentioned a few ...”

“... counsellor and a bureaucrat of the old school. Henry had remained loyal to Henry Tudor throughout Richard III’s reign, despite starvation and torture; despite, according to legend, being interrogated by Richard himself. ‘Thou servest for moonshine in the water a beggarly fugitive,’ ...”

“... already the author of his major works. The Foundation nonetheless took a big punt on the genius of Richard Powers, who was awarded his MacArthur in 1989, aged only 32. I haven’t checked, but he is probably the youngest novelist ever to win a fellowship. Generally unknown in 1989, and temperamentally reticent, he has lately divulged something of his personal ...”

“... Buddensieg, Wyclif was ‘the first to do battle for the maintenance of evangelical faith and English freedom’. Not even the scholarly Workman could escape the myth. For this unabashed admirer, Wyclif was a man born ahead of his time, ‘harbinger of a premature spring’. Did McFarlane escape? His title might suggest not: John Wycliffe and the ...”

“... of seriousness. It has been raised from the level of nostalgia and trivia by four new biographies: Richard Koszarski’s Erich von Stroheim, Roger Icart’s Abel Gance (in French – still searching for an English publisher), Richard Schickel’s D. W. Griffith and now David Robinson’s ...”

“... Germany before the First World War, and read and spoke German; he had also visited England and met English economic historians; and he was the author of a major, synoptic analysis of Feudal Society, first published in 1939 and finally translated into English in 1961, as well as a study of the ‘royal touch’ believed to ...”

“... wanted them to stay. The planners came up against popular opinion, and lost. ‘The well-known English capacity for compromise will triumph,’ one planner gloomily forecast, ‘and we shall get a modern city dressed in “medieval” trappings: a city with a modernised street system incongruously lined with mock “medieval” façades. There can be no ...”

“... recommended it to Harvard University Press, along with the suggestion that Aaron, of the Harvard English Department, be invited to do the job. It took seven years, and involved the reduction of the 17 million words to less than one-tenth and of a thousand ‘characters’ to about forty-five. Very late in life, and then only reluctantly, Inman faced the fact ...”

“... mind it. They don’t to this day, and Churchill’s speeches are praised for their mastery of the English language. However, it is certainly not my view that the way in which Semites and Anti-Semites has been organised reflects a purely compositional decision, which can be assessed by weighing up gains in coherence against losses in effectiveness. On the ...”

“... of’). In some cases, though words are used in a way that is wildly at variance with any known English usage, one can hazard a guess at the intended meaning: if you read ‘projected’ for ‘pivoted’, ‘exemplars’ for ‘pawns’, ‘rejected’ (or possibly ‘parodied’) for ‘parroted’, ‘influential’ for ‘inferential’, then at least ...”

“... Richard Cobb, who died last year at the age of 79, began his career as a historian of Revolutionary France. When I first met him, in 1968, he was widely thought to be able to write only in French, but as time went on a strong personal vein and a taste for high comedy widened the scope of his writing and revealed a highly distinctive English style: intricate perceptions and sensations set down in long, baroque sentences, full of Gallicisms, argot and incantatory lists of French and English place-names ...”