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“... they enjoyed contemplating their suffering. At any rate, the stay-at-homes whose domestic life Jan Lewis describes in The Pursuit of Happiness were ‘awash with self-pity’. There were, of course, other gentry Virginians who pursued active and successful political careers in Washington. Virginians had supplied most of the Presidents and many ...”

“... Its most memorable expression was a poem ‘The Deluge’, by the nationalist leader Saunders Lewis, which began: The tramway climbs from Merthyr to Dowlais, Slime of a snail on a heap of slag. That industrial landscape or wasteland was accurately observed, but the sting was the judgment: ‘here once was Wales.’ It is then unsurprising that the ...”

“... facility newly photographed in large-format full colour by David Moore. The Last Things (Dewi Lewis, £25) opens with an anonymous quote – ‘Ministry of Defence official, London 2007’ – that reads: ‘I don’t understand how you’ve got this far.’ What follows is a series of shots of unpeopled hallways and decontamination chambers, a pot-plant ...”

“... sketch of a new sort of British security officer in 1984. (His story begins in 1936.) Gwyn Lewis, under security scrutiny, is surprised by the appearance of his interrogator: ‘the very expensive City suit, the healthy confidence of skin and voice, the profound self assurance of manner and gesture, seemed to belong in a different, moneyed or ...”

“... states: hyper-defensive nuclear states that all reason suggests are better left alone. As Lewis Dunn puts it in Forecasting Nuclear Proliferation in the 21st Century, in the world imagined by Waltz, nuclear weapons would become ‘the equivalent of possession of a national airline, conventional military forces, or any of the other indicators of state ...”

“... Muppets fed on fantastical, picaresque literary sources: The Dark Crystal on Tolkien, Labyrinth on Lewis Carroll. (The fact that the latter also represented the indisputable nadir in the career of David Bowie is, for the purposes of this review, neither here nor there.) In the film Dreamchild, the cinematic meditation on the life of the real Alice directed by ...”

“... of her own range of knowledge, and she seems to ignore his views, so I may speak up. C.S. Lewis, in the first chapter of his survey of English 16th-century literature (1954), said that earlier writers had treated magic as fanciful and remote, but in this period they felt it might be going on in the next street; and one reason was a thing they ...”

“... method picks up ‘patterns’ across the different lives, as the sociologist Gail Lewis, another of the interviewees, puts it, showing ‘what was possible in terms of subjectivity’ for women in the UK from the 1940s on. And, in doing so, it also shows something of how digitisation changes those possibilities, and has changed the ...”

“... the fossil evidence pro and contra, most of it compellingly pro. An article from December 2015 by Jan Zalasewicz, its chairman, and Colin Waters of the British Geological Survey found plastics, smelted metals, novel radionuclides and raised carbon levels in every cranny of the earth’s crust, as well as new rock forms made of squashed-up toys and nappies and ...”

“... of our impotent rage as urban planners, has now been overtaken by its dreadful fate.’ The Pole Jan Chmielewski, looking at the ruins of Warsaw after his escape from the Majdanek concentration camp, expressed his ‘relief’, having been compelled over the previous decades to witness the city’s ‘chaotic growth … devoid of any planning’. The city ...”

“... of South Africa’s black majority. White South Africa had a remarkable territorial appetite. Jan Smuts, who, well before becoming a Boer general, let alone the great statesman of Anglo-Boer reconciliation, was making it plain that the conquest of the interior by Boer trekkers should be seen as merely a beginning. Ahead lay a greater South ...”

“... was the only person outside the medical profession who had written about her this century. Now Jan Bondeson, whose paper on her appeared in the American Journal of Medical Genetics in 1992, has published a book aimed at a wider audience, called A Cabinet of Medical Curiosities, which includes, among chapters on spontaneous human combustion and maternal ...”

“... his preface: ‘We are in the realm of craft, shape and, now and then, possibly even song.’ And Jan Zwicky, in her introduction to Booth’s translation, details the way the stress and play of vowel sounds in the final proposition of the book give it a certain musicality (‘Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen’). But, by the same ...”

“... Furman of Russia, Gáspár Tamás of Hungary and Slavoj Žižek of Yugoslavia, born in the 1940s; Jan Zielonka of Poland, born in the 1950s; and Ivan Krastev of Bulgaria in the 1960s.1 All save Zielonka were originally trained in philosophy, which – this being Eastern Europe – was no impediment to wider interests: Furman started his career as a historian ...”

“... is so cheeky. Now we’ve read Dylan Thomas, haven’t we, and some John Cowper Powys. And Jan Morris we’ve read. But who else is there?’ ‘You could try Kilvert, maam,’ said Norman. ‘Who’s he?’ ‘A vicar, maam. Nineteenth century. Lived on the Welsh borders and wrote a diary. Fond of little girls.’ ‘Oh,’ said the Queen, ‘like ...”