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“... Is there anyone who can keep in focus both sides of the debate about armaments, who can see fully what is meant by both armers and disarmers? To the armers, who occupy most of the positions of power, British arms, and Western arms generally, appear as the natural and only possible response to a pressing danger. They look like a roof over our heads. To the disarmers, they appear as the main source of that danger ...”

“... odds, in our existence. And the narrator’s account of his great-grandfather, the Reverend Oscar Hopkins, is, by any standards, a weird one. It begins in Devon, with a Christmas pudding snatched from the child’s lips by his harsh Plymouth Brethren father. It ends – as a direct consequence of that pudding – half a world away in 1866, as Oscar sits, ill ...”

“... makes him a sort of grand panjandrum to Hazzard. Cliffs of Fall takes its name from a sonnet by Hopkins; the influence of Victorian literature can be felt in the balance and decorum Hazzard practised throughout her writing. She seems terminally incapable of producing an ugly sentence.To read Hazzard is to be extravagantly well treated, to be made to feel ...”

“... heart seems not to be in the subject – as it was, for example, in her life of Gerard Manley Hopkins. This listlessness is most unfortunate in the dialogue. What is the use of Ruskin making an appearance to say, ‘All right, then, temporarily I will pay for a suitable room large enough to accommodate her needs,’ or Gabriel adding, ‘Perhaps John and ...”

“... infant prince’s brow metamorphosed into a devout drenching. In rather the same spirit, Father Hopkins wrote an epithalamion for a friend’s wedding which goes off into a vividly lyrical picture of boys bathing in a stream, and returns to remind us that water is ‘spousal love’. And to record the breaking of the great drought of 1984 made ‘a fitting ...”

“... thinks this is terribly vulgar and refuses to do it. Also, he says, according to research at Johns Hopkins University, people who change sex quite often commit suicide. I feel worried for Caroline, who at the moment looks so happy. Monday. I am out of hospital but I missed the literary party. Still, my cousin Cate is giving one for single people. I am on three ...”

“... own words that her models were the divas of opera and theatre, or the great dancers of ballet: Sarah Bernhardt, Eleonora Duse et al (silent movies are much closer to ballet and grand theatre than they are to Breaking Bad). Both Bernhardt and Duse offered the young Negri the same melancholy advice: one could choose perfection of the life or perfection of ...”

“... mutton and potatoes under it’ on which the company is feasting in The Pickwick Papers while Jack Hopkins tells the story of the child who swallowed a necklace. Dickens couldn’t stop sensing. ‘His imagination overwhelms everything,’ Orwell concluded, ‘like a kind of weed.’ But it isn’t enough to notice him noticing. Dickens did a great deal more ...”

“... of Cardinal Newman might have been another matter’). Edward, in turn, has an affair with Sarah Devlin, a sharp-tongued Catholic girl from a nearby village, while fulminating against Irish disloyalty and growing more and more eccentric – violently so, in the end. But the plotting is less important than the large-scale set pieces, such as a ...”