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“... deputies refused to support it. Wilhelm I dissolved Parliament and called elections, in the hope of producing a more pliable house. But the new chamber was even more resolutely liberal than the old. In the spring of 1862, this parliament, too, was dissolved, but the new elections of May 1862 merely confirmed the intractability of the standoff. More than ...”

“... likewise gives us food for thought, but this time the food is not outré like oysters. What hope is there, after a killing? Only this – and if we insist on prefacing it with ‘only’, we have already sold the pass:And today a girl walks in home to usCarrying a basket full of new potatoes,Three tight green cabbages, and carrotsWith the tops and mould ...”

“... Christopher Middleton​ hated New York. Among the things he particularly disliked, I suspect, is New York’s position as a cultural bazaar, where reputations are bought, sold and traded, with the attendant buzz of speculation. He was incapable of schmoozing, and his career suffered accordingly. New York’s greatest draw, people action and brute energy, would have been lost on him ...”

“... To read Donald Prater’s biography of Rilke in the hope of getting to know the poet in depth would be a tantalising exercise. Lack of information is not the problem. There is no shortage of documentary evidence available to the investigator and Prater has made full use of it. Rilke himself supplied his large share in letters of a princely egocentricity, upon which he appears to have lavished a formidable outlay of time and creative energy ...”

“... He practises the usual self-compiler’s device of using his introduction to review his book: ‘I hope that the truly serious reader will be able to detect, in even the least grave of the following essays, a certain disinclination to make cheap jokes, or at any rate a determination to make only expensive ones if I can.’ He finds that the reviews of two ...”

“... illness. Until recently, aside from a pioneering selection of stories assembled by the translator Christopher Middleton in 1982, his work has barely been available in English. But now, thanks to a steady accumulation of volumes from New York Review Books, and a gifted group of translators willing to wrestle with the often fiendish difficulties of his strange ...”

“... of his stairs wearing the red leather slippers and grey cardigan that meant he was off duty. ‘Christopher,’ he greeted me in a kindly voice. ‘Hello, sir,’ I said, with a vague sense of relief that I wasn’t to be punished. He was holding the telephone receiver. ‘It’s your father on the telephone.’‘...”

“... of Utah, of all places, and had the students demanding their thousand-dollar fee back? Warhol’s hope had been, ‘Maybe they’ll like him better than me,’ but surely there was some faint private relief on his part that this particular con didn’t work. It’s a warm evening and MOMA has thrown open her garden. No sweet scent of the exotic cheroot taints ...”

“... In his book about religion, Peter Hitchens has a lot more to say about his brother Christopher than Christopher has to say about Peter in his book about himself.* ‘Some brothers get on,’ Peter writes mournfully, ‘some do not. We were the sort that just didn’t.’ He continues: At one stage – I was about nine, he nearly 12 – my poor gentle father actually persuaded us to sign a peace treaty in the hope of halting our feud ...”

“... and fall of the Roman Empire was accelerated by the social conflicts which he depicts? Let us hope that the young will read him, despite the length and the cumbrous organisation of his book, and despite its alarming price. An abbreviated paperback soon would seem to be the ...”

“... time to denounce publicly those journalists who had dared to print the name of the head of MI6, Christopher Curwen. The heads of the CIA and the KGB, William Casey and Victor Chebrikov, are of course public figures. But that, as Mr Ingham would say, is not the point. What the point is remains obscure. In 1932 the novelist Compton Mackenzie was tried for a ...”

“... of his country parish. Yet he endured all the strain not merely for the pleasures involved, or the hope of advancing his career, but for the fame such friendships conferred. And now they all crowd like a levee in the footnotes to his letters. Sometimes the irony finds its happiness in that a good motive was alive in the unfortunate circumstance, as when ...”

“... or implicitly claim to deal with questions of police power and its abuses, it’s hard not to hope for something more than straightforward inversions of the mythic neighbourhood bobby. Unfortunately, the only one of these books with any insight into the daily grind of law enforcement and the attitudes it engenders is a failure as a novel; the other ...”

“... themselves than as furnishing the perfect polemical points de repère; over the years the poems of Christopher Middleton, of J.H. Prynne, and of C.H. Sisson, have all found themselves not so much constituting the grounds of Davie’s argument as figuring in it. But Milosz is too stubborn and faceted to be functionalised, even in the most high-minded way, and ...”

“... del be del, va omid, omid ast’ (‘marriage is the exchange of one heart for another, and hope is hope’). The Iranians reward him with whooping. Emboldened, he gives them a burst of Hafez, the best loved of all the poets. More exclamations of delight: ‘Bah! Bah!’ When the applause dies down, my father calls ...”