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“... Some thirty years ago, as he ploughed through hundreds of pamphlets on the Anglo-American conflict published in the colonies before 1776, Bernard Bailyn was struck by the excitement with which their authors spoke about what were for him ‘the common-places of liberal thought of their time’. How to explain their apparently inexhaustible appetite for the ideas and rhetoric of late 17th and 18th-century British political oppositionists? The mélange of dissident opinion now subsumed under the rubric of ‘radical Country ideology’ stigmatised the Walpole Government as a corrupt power-grabbing conspiracy against popular liberties ...”

“... For the last thirty years Richard Sennett – urban sociologist, historian, novelist – has been meditating on the culture and ecology of industrial cities: on how they evolved, on how their physical organisation and social structure related to the psychological and moral experiences of their inhabitants. More pointedly than his previous books, The Conscience of the Eye, he says, aims to show the interactions between the ‘architectural, urban planning, public sculpture, and the visual scenes of the city’ and its ‘cultural life ...”

“... she knows that dreamers risk a loss of self once their orbitings bypass the human community. Uncle Daniel in The Ponder Heart, insulated from the actual by his fantasies, drifts off to cuckoo-land. Circe, the unchanging daughter of the gods, is fated to repeat her gyrations, because she is unable to grieve or to feel sympathy. Pain in Eudora Welty’s stories ...”

“... Henry Adams is a rare bird in American letters: rich, autonomous, and socially unassailable; descendant of Presidents, secure within the genteel Establishment, yet holding himself aloof from it; historian of his country, toward which he felt a proprietary concern; and, by his own reckoning, ‘a failure in politics and literature, in society and in solitude, in hatred and in love ...”

“... reader. After many vicissitudes the Library of America was launched, under the direction of Daniel Aaron, Richard Poirier and Jason Epstein, who had worked with Wilson on the original abortive project. These people and their associates raised $600,000 from the Ford Foundation and then $1.2 million from the National Endowment for the ...”

“... by the experience, and not the other way round. It is thus an especially appropriate ending to Daniel Aaron’s edition of the Inman Diaries and evidence of the deftness, imagination and tough economy which mark everything he has managed to do with this amazing sprawl of a document. During those 44 years in Garrison Hall the diary was Arthur Inman’s ...”

“... found themselves so articulate while also failing to convey any sense of what actually happened. Daniel Aaron, in his 1973 book, The Unwritten War: American Writers and the Civil War, said: ‘our untidy and unkempt war confounds interpreters.’ The Iraq war, untidy and unkempt to say the least, has produced an even more stunning mass ...”

“... put into play. The story is narrated by a Paul Auster figure, a dedicated novelist called Peter Aaron whose c.v. includes a French apprenticeship, a novel called Luna, even (like his creator) a spell teaching at Princeton. He writes about Sachs, who has confided to him the secret of his final, fatal phase, from an admiring, quizzical standpoint not unlike ...”

“... with the story of Nadia, a writer who has used the desk for a quarter of a century, ever since Daniel Varsky, a young Chilean poet with whom she had a brief affair in the early 1970s, left it in her care before being murdered by Pinochet’s secret police. After several failed romantic relationships in the years that followed, the emotionally impoverished ...”

“... head. This house, and the wooded landscape surrounding it, was built by Andrew’s ‘father’, Aaron, who was the first of the many souls to work out what was going on. With the help of a kindly therapist, Aaron tamed the chaotic inner landscape, imposing order and building a life in the outside world. Then, exhausted by ...”

“... editions, monographs and conferences – but readers are most likely to have encountered him in Daniel Kehlmann’s novel Measuring the World (2007). His portrait of two famous scientists, Humboldt and the mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss, is a stylish comedy that gently mocks Humboldt’s belief in an ordered and interconnected universe. Donald ...”

“... it not long afterwards, and it must be a coincidence – though it didn’t feel like one – that Aaron Sorkin’s The West Wing began airing in 1999: the series that patented the walk-and-talk, with characters trading quips at speed as they zipped down the White House corridors. CJ, Josh, Donna, Sam: quick-thinking, smart, hilarious, kind – this was a ...”

“... Wiley also grows up. Since Harold and Wiley are both adopted, and since the given name of each was Aaron, it seems they are more or less interchangeable protagonists. Harold recalls the emotional turmoil of his early adolescence when both of his adoptive parents were terminally ill, the estranged father in hospital, and the mother at home feeding off her ...”

“... This new issue of Daniel Defoe’s Tour through the Whole Island of Great Britain is very pretty. It is a glossy book, lavishly illustrated with 18th-century maps, portraits, landscapes, prospects of towns and representations of buildings, markets, ships. This is obviously meant to function as a coffee-table book, or as a book to put in the back of a car (along with the National Trust’s guides ...”

“... was inhabited by giants, notably the ‘great triumvirate’ of John C. Calhoun, Henry Clay and Daniel Webster, as well as eloquent spokesmen on both sides of the slavery question, such as Stephen Douglas and William Seward. John Quincy Adams didn’t consider it beneath him to serve in the House after his term as president. Such men offer a sharp contrast ...”