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“... one moves in a cocoon of incandescent heat. You could just about imagine a story in the manner of Paul Bowles unfolding here – where an intrepid European manuscript scholar, say, is snatched by Touaregs and spends the rest of a miserable life, sun-blistered and crazed, on the fringes of the desert, never to be seen by Westerners again. But it takes a lot ...”

“... has more Nobel laureates per capita than anywhere else in the world. The other winner was Arthur Lewis, who took the economics prize in 1979. Walcott won his in 1992. By happy coincidence they share a birthday and the government makes a fuss of its favoured children with a Nobel Laureate Week each January. Asked my business at the airport on my way to record ...”

“... is worth nothing if it doesn’t cost too much. When he discovered that his theologian friend Paul Elmer More didn’t believe in hell, he was indignant and wrote: ‘Is your God some kind of Santa Claus?’ This morality literally erupts in two letters in the volume, producing moments of shock amid an otherwise totally absorbing (perhaps I mean ...”

“... realistic settings and chronological order). And then on top of that a mal-coiffed Daniel Day-Lewis – a brain surgeon, if you will – and his reiterated and creepily effective ‘Take off your clothes!’ Younger reader, I read no more. Or at least no more Kundera. He had settled in France, where he went into exile in 1975, taken French ...”

“... As charm is to Cary Grant, awkwardness to Jerry Lewis, vulnerability to Montgomery Clift, so malevolence is to Dennis Hopper. Very few actors specialised as Hopper did in convincing malice. Vincent Price was too camp to be really alarming, even as the witchfinder general. Peter Lorre was heartbreaking as a child murderer ...”

“... But the cultural Cold War has proved more difficult to assess; no single study can match John Lewis Gaddis’s We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History (1997). Unlike power bloc politics, cultural matters were bound up with local histories, deep-seated traditions and long-standing stereotypes. It is worth asking, indeed, whether there was such a thing as ...”

“... with Augustine). Following a line of argument in the writings of Jesus’s contemporary admirer Paul of Tarsus, who never met Jesus in his earthly life but shaped much subsequent Christian thought, Augustine emphasised that humanity’s disobedience left it helpless before God’s wrath. If God chose to exercise mercy, that was his business; humanity had no ...”

“... agriculture and natural history. He spent his days in New York’s public libraries studying Lewis Mumford’s The Culture of Cities, biology texts and government agriculture statistics, then published the results in Weber’s journal. Contemporary Issues received little attention and as its failure became obvious Weber turned on his acolytes. In 1958 he ...”

“... and generosity (he wanted to make a magazine where he himself, Eliot, Joyce and Wyndham Lewis could appear regularly – an annexe to the Vortex – but was determined to accept anything that had quality). Much of the detail lacks interest, however, and it is hard to avoid the ungrateful reflection that, since the fine detail is largely of concern ...”

“... of rock ’n’ roll focuses on the white triumvirate – Presley, Buddy Holly and Jerry Lee Lewis, who have at different times heaped contumely on themselves – neglecting its roots in Jazz and the Blues, and a sibling relationship with Soul. Along the way, that history has appropriated the music on behalf of a white audience by perpetuating the myths ...”

“... The incredible frequency of these strikes proves best of all the extent to which the social war has broken out all over England. No week passes, scarcely a day, indeed, in which there is not a strike in some direction, now against a reduction, then against a refusal to raise the rate of wages ... sometimes against new machinery, or for a hundred other reasons ...”

“... he is attempting to heal old wounds and soften his ‘stern age’ into peace. Similarly, C. Day Lewis’s translation of the Aeneid (1952) might be regarded as a shrewd strategy by an establishment operator who hoped one day to succeed Masefield as Poet Laureate. More charitably, it could be argued that Day Lewis’s ...”

“... 8.35). We were given the example of the Full Gospel Central Church in Seoul, where the pastor Paul Yonggi Cho had built up a congregation of 500,000 members, through the exercise of the gifts of the Spirit. My notes for that day are full of numbers: ‘3770 verses, 4 gospels. 727 – 19 per cent! – refer to healing/rez of dead’. On Wednesday we were ...”

“... who were wrestling with apartheid, among them Nadine Gordimer, Ezekiel Mphelele, Dennis Brutus and Lewis Nkosi.From the start, Transition had commissioned work from political figures. In the second issue, in 1961, Julius Nyerere published a defence of the one-party system that would soon exasperate so many of the magazine’s writers: the following year he ...”

“... of revolt did, however, run in the family. His maternal grandmother, Mary Patterson, married Lewis Sheridan Leary in 1858. The following year, Leary was recruited by John Brown for his suicidal raid on Harpers Ferry, and the bullet-riddled shawl that was eventually returned to Mary was in due course used as a blanket for the infant Langston (a middle ...”