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“... Eminent social scientists are not normally household names, but in the middle decades of the 20th century Barbara Wootton was well-known far outside the dim corridors of universities. Paradoxically for one who lived an intensely private life, she was perhaps best known as the lady professor who had flashed across the tabloid headlines by marrying a taxi-driver ...”

“... debates on the philosophy of punishment, by a revival of retributivism. As Nigel Walker and Philip Bean make clear in their lucid guides to these debates, it is Kant and Hegel, rather than Bentham and Beccaria, who are winning the arguments these days. Retributivism seems to speak to that yearning for society to speak as a moral actor. As an ...”

“... Rhode Island, a Korean vet. Once I was a poet, I wrote           of bean spasms,       was anthologised in Fuck You.’ ‘You’re never Berrigan, that spring Where all the river of style freezes?’ I ask, awe all over my facials. ‘I’m an American       Primitive,’ he says, ‘I make up each verse as it ...”

“... with skin as biliously green as the Wicked Witch of the West and, in a riotous series of drawings, Philip Guston transformed the president’s ski nose and heavy jowls into a glumly expressive set of male genitalia. Nixon’s personality was even richer. Gore Vidal parodied him in his 1960 play The Best Man and, beginning in the late 1960s, an impressive ...”

“... Lady Diana Cooper is capable of saying anything, if she thinks you are dumb enough to swallow it. Philip Ziegler has reason to consider himself astute, but he perhaps ruled out too soon the possibility that the queen of the put-on had spotted the ideal patsy. The chief lacuna in an otherwise interesting book is its failure adequately to convey the heroine’s ...”

“... household names in Britain until he published them at Jonathan Cape. His stable has included Philip Roth, García Márquez, McEwan, Martin Amis, Barnes, Rushdie, Vonnegut, Chatwin, Fowles, Deighton and, Maschler does not fear to admit, Jeffrey Archer. The title he was most excited to publish was Catch 22, a novel he took on after more myopic others had ...”

“... voices on the TV Aliens Show, and in advertisements featuring talking crisp-packets and baked-bean cans-Saladin is now a suspected illegal immigrant and a virtual outlaw. Thrown out by his wife, he goes to ground in Brickhall, an Asian district of Inner London. Here racial tension mounts, as Saladin becomes a cull-hero while awaiting his opportunity for ...”

“... of King Solomon’s murdered builder Hiram Abiff – proved congenial to English Jacobites, while Philip Jenkins detects a distinctive Jacobite and Country hue in Welsh Masonry. On the other hand, John Money, a keen student of provincial clubbability, notes that while the political stance of Masonry remained broadly Whiggish, in practice the lack of ...”

“... the age.For most of 1878 Darwin was at home in Down House in Kent, observing his onions, his bean radicles and the ‘seedling plants’ that ‘at present are my delight’. He was particularly interested in their response to external stimuli. ‘Should you ever be able to observe a sensitive Mimosa whilst it [is]raining hard & is hot weather,’ he ...”

“... however things might look from Adelaide, he, Auster, does not have a similar status in New York to Philip Roth’s. Coetzee, in turn, never seems condescending or even to notice Auster’s relative non-nimbleness: Auster is a fellow novelist with similar modernist allegiances, and, one imagines, good company at public events where others might be either ...”