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“... In one of the ruminative, generalising passages interspersed among the domestic and public scenes in War and Peace (battles, a formal ball, the burning of Moscow and so forth), Tolstoy grapples with the question of what degree of free will a human being of any social class might be supposed to have. The paradoxical conclusion he comes to is that the higher the position an individual occupies in his society, the less free he is to act as he wishes ...”

“... successor can be nominated by a president of their choosing: as well as Anthony Kennedy, Justices Sandra Day O’Connor, Lewis Powell, Warren Burger, David Souter and John Paul Stevens all did so. For Ginsburg to stay on the court risked ‘disaster’, in Randall Kennedy’s view: ‘The female Thurgood Marshall will be replaced by a female Clarence ...”

“... crew in his driveway, is caught on camera getting Sabrina’s name wrong (‘I didn’t even know Sandra’), digital vigilantes pounce on the slip as evidence that he is a crisis actor paid by the government. The next day, he sees his own deer-in-the-headlights face made into a meme, with arrows reading ‘liar!’ pointing at his head. Online, dozens of ...”

“... shifted in the early 1960s towards young people, and the circulating libraries – Boots and Smith’s – disappeared, her English spinsters and clerics were deemed unlikely to sell. Jonathan Cape, Pym’s long-term publisher, summarily rejected Pym’s seventh novel, An Unsuitable Attachment, and she began fourteen long years in literary limbo. Her ...”

“... writing about painting; visual art brightens her prose) and of the performance artist Anna Deavere Smith. As Gubar celebrates them, Ringgold and Deavere Smith offer visions of impossible reconciliation. Deavere Smith’s one-woman show, Fires in the Mirror, an account of the murderous ...”

“... after she had achieved publication, problems remained. In a letter written to her close friend Bob Smith (who published the first appreciative essay on her novels) Barbara Pym lightly passes on the information from Cape that ‘8 Americans and 10 Continental publishers saw and “declined” ... Excellent Women and they are still plodding on with [Jane and ...”

“... spirit of the new music in the same way that the voice of Mahalia Jackson identified Gospel. John Smith’s discography of Johnny Cash, who was resident in Memphis at the time and also benefited from Phillips’s expertise, contributes to the idea of a movement. Presley’s intelligence, however, has always been in doubt. Joe Esposito, his infamous ...”

“... years later he and his wife Elizabeth left England for Nauvoo, Illinois. There he built Joseph Smith a temple that was not quite completed when the prophet was shot dead by a mob. Another mob burned down Miles’s temple, and he fled Nauvoo with his family. Hounded by animals, Indians and more mobs, they made their way to Salt Lake City, where he helped ...”

“... The heroine of Civil to Strangers is Cassandra Marsh-Gibbon (Barbara Pym addressed herself as ‘Sandra’ in her Oxford diaries) and she is married to a vain, hypochondriac but (to her) lovable novelist called Adam. Pym wrote to Henry Harvey at the time that ‘Adam is sweet but very stupid. You are sweet too, but not as consistently stupid as Adam.’ As ...”

“... The principal villains seen as promulgating these doctrines are scholars like Harry Collins, Sandra Harding, Bruno Latour, Simon Schaffer and Steven Shapin. Now whether these alleged enemies have anything in common, and whether there is a genuine package of claims about science that count as constructivism or relativism or Post-Modernism are serious ...”

“... from 1660 – this is omitting foreign authors, pseudonymous characters like ‘Captain Alexander Smith’, and others whose masculinity may be nominal. It would be rash to expect all these to qualify for Spender’s epithet ‘good’. But if Ann Emelinda Skinn and M. Peddle (two of Dale’s hundred best tunes) deserve a place in the record, it is not ...”

“... chips for his neighbour Terry Clark (arriving back at Clark’s at 10 p.m.); Clark’s partner, Sandra – Sharon’s sister – put the time of the errand an hour earlier. How convenient, Wright said, that Boyd should give himself an alibi for the precise time Nikki died (a time which was not then publicly known). Boyd claimed to have seen Nikki playing in ...”

“... a part. How often we read a beginner’s review that compares a thin thing to a fat one. ‘John Smith, like Tolstoy, is very interested in the way men interact under the conditions of battle.’ Well, no.It was this assumption of authority that allowed Hardwick to produce ‘The Decline of Book Reviewing’, and to deliver the swift and slashing put-downs ...”

“... seem to come in generational bursts). All writers on the Brontës now benefit from Margaret Smith’s magisterial – much overdue – edition of Charlotte’s extant letters, published by Oxford in three volumes between 1995 and 2004. Barker and Gordon have both made contributions to this anniversary season: Barker’s publishers have issued an updated ...”

“... the son of the author of Wind in the Willows?A. A nickname: Mouse.Tell the Bede story to Maggie Smith, who recalls some lines she had to sing in revue:Oh, I am the Venerable BedeI can scarcely write and just about read.18 February. Listening to the last movement of Elgar’s First Symphony I’m put in mind of some huge submerged mass coming to the ...”