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“... it is hardly likely to have been by intention, the writers of all the new books commemorating D-Day, 6 June 1944, adopt a wholly different narrative strategy. And it has to be said that from a military and a literary point of view it is not really a success. No eagle’s-eye view of war, and no sure grasp of events. Contemporary technology in a different if ...”

“... this time it’s clear that the servant is the master in all kinds of senses, and not just for a day, and Bogarde is not content until he has converted the house into a brothel, and Fox into a drooling drunk who can only slump on the landing as his house and his life fall away from him. Craig returns at this point, and volunteers for a bit of humiliation of ...”

“... That film – starring Jeremy Brett, another Sherlock – is hard to sit through now thanks to Robin Ellis’s stagey American accent in the voiceovers. But it’s intelligently adapted and still looks pretty stylish in the way of Granada’s Brideshead Revisited, of which it was presumably sold as the highbrow counterpart. The BBC Parade’s End was ...”

“... into our antique political culture than a party leadership contest. I remember talking with Robin Cook just as the Blair bandwagon began to assume unstoppable proportions. Cook had outfought and out-performed every other Labour contender by a mile; he was cleverer, more experienced, funnier. And yet what he was having to read in the press was an ...”

“... she struggled to find adequate translations for such ‘semiarchaic’ words as honour and renown. Robin Lane Fox thinks that Simone Weil’s conception of elemental ‘Force’, which turns humans into objects, is too reductive to apply to Homer’s heroes, but on rereading Weil’s essay on the Iliad I shared her sense of an almost smothering desolation at ...”

“... than sitting at the Chancellor’s desk watching our currency reserves gurgle down the plughole day by day and knowing that the drain cannot be stopped ... It was like swimming in a heavy sea. As soon as we emerged from the buffeting of one wave, another would hit us before we could catch our breath.’ On and on went the ...”

“... but at the end I found myself almost envying those who had watched it on television. The one-day game has brought ‘atmosphere’ to cricket, we are often told; you really have to ‘be there’ to savour the extraordinary new passion that has been engendered by the certainty of an outright result. As it turns out, all this means is that cricket fans ...”

“... they’re proper mothers: she made a cake every Friday, picked her children up from school one day a week, tried to make friends with the stay-at-home mothers who networked in the playground (she always turned up, she says, in tracksuit and trainers, to show she was ‘focused’ on the children), and tried not to cancel outings. One half-term she’d ...”

“... the same time they are the walking wounded of the sexual revolution, each of them somehow maimed. Robin Ross, a folklorist and playwright, has just died, the evening before, from cancer; and yet she rises, one last time, in order to judge the narrator, who for one reason and another didn’t quite get round to visiting – ‘Always a little out of the ...”

“... and army deserters, not the common thieves. It is no wonder that he is often called the French Robin Hood. Mandrin’s story, however, did not end like Robin Hood’s. The France of Louis XV, despite its relatively weak police force, still had far more coercive power at its disposal than the England of John Lackland, and ...”

“... a kind of historical News of the World? (All human life is here.) Perhaps. Dryasdust has had his day and good riddance. Don’t be deceived by the slick subtitles, however. Peter Lake knows more than anyone else about the religious culture of the secondary and tertiary stages of the English Reformation. This is not only a book of dazzling brilliance and ...”

“... and reprieves. There were no ‘bandits’, and the highwaymen were very far from being latter-day Robin Hoods. The analysis of those who constituted the juries of life and death and undertook the prosecutions, mainly small farmers and tradesmen, brings further evidence that the thesis that the law was merely an instrument of upper-class or élite ...”

“... just shy of his tenth birthday, all the journeys he’d taken had been completed within a day or a fraction of a day – in the car to the holiday cottage in Poiana, up the bumpy tracks to the oil derricks, to Bucharest on the train. The journey that began on 15 October 1940 took four years. But in some sense it ...”

“... generally anti-religious, but sometimes just opposed to the futile or facile conventions of the day. Sometimes, indeed, what’s subverted is the progressive attitude the author began with. Take Louisa May Alcott, American progenitor of the ‘happy family’ story. (Charlotte M. Yonge had invented the genre in England with her novel The Daisy Chain.) You ...”

“... at the Slade only on the condition that a Rolls Royce dropped her off and picked her up again each day. She spent the 1920s coasting round the Mediterranean with Picasso, Ezra Pound, Natalie Barney and Yeats, and was one of the few women included in the International Surrealist Exhibition of 1936 (although she rejected labels, insisting that her work should be ...”