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“... It will end in 2025, with the bicentenary of the end of the wars and the independence of Bolivia. Robert Harvey’s splendid book gives us the first large-scale narrative of Latin America’s struggle for independence in English since – well, when exactly? It is hard to think of any comparable attempt to come to grips with the whole vast story, and in ...”

“... biography is said, though I have never seen any public announcement, to have fallen on Robert Rhodes James. If so, it is an excellent decision. Meanwhile Mr David Carlton has produced a scholarly, well-written work of some five hundred pages. The author admits very fairly that it is in the nature of an interim verdict since the official records of ...”

“... the landmarks of Marxian economic thinking include Ernest Mandel’s Late Capitalism (1972), David Harvey’s Limits to Capital (1982), Giovanni Arrighi’s Long 20th Century (1994) and Robert Brenner’s Economics of Global Turbulence (2006), all expressly concerned with the grinding tectonics and punctual quakes of ...”

“... Was​ Lydia Harvey ‘respectable’ or wasn’t she? This was a question on which a surprising number of people had a view in the summer of 1910, including the prime minister of New Zealand. Earlier that year, Harvey, then sixteen, had been working as a photographer’s assistant in Wellington when she suddenly left her boarding house ...”

“... guns means two gunmen, and two gunmen make a conspiracy. But who was in the conspiracy? Well, Lee Harvey Oswald was. It is now fairly clear that he did not shoot the President, but it is equally clear that he was set up – probably willingly – to take the blame. He had played the role of patsy twice before. Summers argues convincingly that Oswald’s ...”

“... remained unbroken all her life. Would she have married the most ardent of these crushes – Henry Harvey, later of the British Council – if he had asked her? The answer seems to have been yes, in which case we might well have had no novels, as we should probably have had none if Jane Austen had taken the plunge. But at 19 she was already a dedicated ...”

“... When​ I was about eight my schoolfriend Harvey invited me to join his Anti-Jew Gang. I was born just after the outbreak of war, so this must have been 1947 or 1948. Harvey hadn’t the slightest idea what a Jew was, but since I was his friend it was evident I couldn’t be one ...”

“... Robert Edric specialises in historical backwaters. His novels, 19 to date, unfold in isolated fishing villages, colonial outposts or Alpine spa towns. What these places have in common is that they seem removed from larger political conflicts, though they replay them in claustrophobic miniature. Edric’s imagination has always been drawn to the peripheral, to characters who are set apart, or seeking a geography to match their sense of spiritual exile ...”

“... the diaries and letters already available. The early novels reflect Barbara Pym’s love for Henry Harvey, whom she met at Oxford; her alternately anguished and wry but unrewarded pursuit of him is affectingly revealed in the pre-war section of A Very Private Life, and it is touching to find that he visited her in hospital in Oxford three days before she ...”

“... Robert Burchfield, Editor of the Oxford English Dictionary, made a bid to unite two nations divided by a common language by unveiling the Oxford American Dictionary, which includes such words as gridlock (“urban traffic jam”). ’ So proclaimed the Sunday Telegraph Magazine. British and American English do indeed differ in all sorts of ways, as the following list of equivalent pairs will remind any doubters: lift/elevator, push-chair/stroller, bonnet/hood, boot/trunk, windscreen/windshield ...”

“... and provided much of the rationale for deregulation; the second wave of free-market economists (Robert Lucas, for example, or Gary Becker), who took apart the field of macroeconomics in favour of game theory, behavioural economics, rational expectations and other individualist approaches; and journalists like George Gilder and Jude Wanniski who recast the ...”

“... us to take the will for the deed. And he bad not much more interest in prosody than David Jones. Harvey Oxenhorn, in an admirably patient and respectful study,* points out MacDiarmid’s ‘need to provoke and convince’, and remarks: ‘As readers we are not much attuned these days to a verse of exhortation and overt opinion; where MacDiarmid’s writing ...”

“... seems to have been a dysfunctional misfit. Of course, the assassination had puzzling aspects: Lee Harvey Oswald’s lengthy stay in the Soviet Union during some of the hottest years of the Cold War; the unlikely trajectory of one of the three bullets fired from the Texas School Book Depository, the ‘magic bullet’ which passed through the president’s ...”

“... who gather around her, names such as Raphael Faber (compare Hardy’s Angel Clare), Hugh Pink, Harvey Organ, Ralph Tempest and Harold Manchester. Such names would belong in satire or pastoral but sit oddly in a fictional world which is so close to the fringes of the ‘real’ historical world that it offers walk-on parts to actual persons, including ...”

“... we can’t altogether accept the claims of his literary Muse, who allows him some felicities – Robert Flaherty was ‘like an Irish Bishop who had turned gangster’ – but more often lets him flounder (‘She was a neat chick’, of a Czech actress of the Thirties), we can at least salute the book’s utter transparency and lack of guile about both ...”