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“... world. Apart from help from Spender’s family and friends, we are told that the typescript was read by Frank Kermode, Stuart Hampshire, Richard Wollheim and Karl Miller, a formidable jury who, at the very least, seem likely to have ensured that a satisfactory account of the Encounter imbroglio would be given. Faced with ...”

“... was impossible to add fresh horror to the story of Mary killing her mother, but that was before I read Wilson’s version:Chairs, crockery, peas, beef, and bread on the floor; mother, bloody from chest to waist, lifeless; father, forehead gashed, bellowing; Aunt Sarah flinching in the corner. Mary towers over the riot, her eyes animal-wild. She has a ...”

“... to coax a shadow universe into pure existence. It was obviously written by someone who had read Borges. By 1971, however, Borges was clearly not himself. In ‘Borges and I’, he wrote: I must remain in Borges rather than in myself (if in fact I am a self), and yet I recognise myself less in his books than in many others, or in the rich strumming of ...”

“... with light sheaves of paper, grinning. ‘Keep busy outdoors, in charge of your own time,’ it read. ‘Ideal for students, housewives and pensioners.’ He showed me a day’s work from just after Christmas: three rounds, sorting and delivering 323 pieces of mail, weighing a total of 81.4 kilograms, to 279 addresses. Sandd claimed this should take six ...”

“... contract what they do not trust political consensus to deliver. Gould’s book is a chatty, brisk read that covers many of the crucial questions that health policy must address, and begins at exactly the right point: by asking what we think doctors are really for. He points out that ‘there is a wide range of different kinds of doctor,’ and therefore ...”

“... difficult days. He soon dominated the proceedings by the quickness of his wit and his ability to read and to lead the Deputies’ mood. Others were more popular (criticism of him from within has recently grown) but they were identified with particular factions or groups, which only Khasbulatov seemed able to span; as the Parliament turned against the ...”

“... luxury of cleanliness’, especially pernicious to women in childbirth. It is impossible to read this book without marvelling at the rich blend of credulity and chicanery that characterised medical practice, and at the docility with which patients submitted to manifestly absurd and even injurious ‘cures’. The doctors, we learn from Corbin’s new ...”

“... figures. He notes that people who have never visited museums feel that there are too many words to read. One is surprised that they were permitted (or could be bothered) to fill in this part of a questionnaire, but their response does at least suggest that some of the less educated members of the public would not appreciate having information about the class ...”

“... Too honest to ignore the similarity to supposed Puritan ideals of the work of the Bridgettine monk Richard Whitford, who wrote in the 1520s, Collinson is compelled to treat Catholic Humanists as proto-Puritans – which weakens his claim that it was Puritan divines who held a distinctively Puritan attitude to the family. Moreover, he is led into caricaturing ...”

“... John Moore, and his uncle Thomas Arthur. There, in the parlour, Mistress Benchkin asked him to read out her new will, which he did ‘plainely and distinktly’, and shortly afterwards signed the will in witness. The will was discovered by another Canterbury burrower, Frank Tyler, in 1939. It is the only known example of Marlowe’s signature, and ...”

“... of that event the detachment and disenchantment necessary to shatter accepted orthodoxies. Thus Richard Cobb’s vivid writings have shown how little the Revolution affected many of the poorest and most peripheral Frenchmen. More subversive still, it was another British scholar, Alfred Cobban, who demolished the long-accepted Marxist notion that the ...”

“... an underlying story, they have no narrative as such and work as separate units. At worst, they read like a cross between R.D. Laing’s case-notes and Richard Aldington’s Imagism. At best, they have a force and integrity which none of the other poets associated with the Review, and few poets since, have come close to ...”

“... and only occasionally – one finds a little reality in this space-age world. Major-General Richard Secord (retd) came face to face with it. ‘In Beirut,’ he told Bradlee, it always mystified me why we couldn’t pin down the location of the hostages. It’s a small place. I told Ollie many times: ‘If I were the director [of the CIA], I would ...”

“... The other great refuge of liberal optimism, in 1914 as in 1867, was education. It is hard to read Russell On Education without seeing that the subject was carrying a misplaced faith: education is a fine means of intellectual development, but he might more often have remembered when working on education his own Humean belief that ‘reason is and ever ...”

“... the Dutch school, starting with Tom Ocker, one of the quickest players ever, who was followed by Richard Krajicek, the 1997 Wimbledon winner. And then we need a survey of the many Americans who emerged from Florida and California, beginning with Gardnar Mulloy through to Chris Evert, who is handsomely profiled in the book’s last and best section, ‘The ...”