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“... Pynchon was born on Long Island, New York in 1937. He studied engineering, physics and, later, English literature, at Cornell University, then worked as a technical writer for Boeing until 1962. Not long after that, he more or less disappeared from public view. His fame rests primarily on what can for convenience be thought of as his three great novels of ...”

“... and authorship in the past thirty years. Very good entries on Law (Ross Cranston), Culture (Richard White) and on K.R. Murdoch (David Bowman) are exceptions to the general level. Even granting their own terms – those of closed and authoritative, rather than open and provisional history – the Dictionary and chronology could be much more ...”

“... a quotation labouring to attain a modicum of reality. Not so much a dry David Hockney splash as Richard Wilson’s site-specific installation 20:50: his tank of sump oil, miraculously transubstantiated into this brilliant new substance, a liquid thicker than jelly but lighter than air. A seductive mosaic carpet across which you cannot walk without ...”

“... then switch to the stark monochrome field of Horses, and other images waiting in the wings: Richard Hell, Iggy Pop, the Ramones. It really was, as the old cliché has it, that black and white. There was no commando unit of primpy stylists for Smith in 1975 – just her, Mapplethorpe and (as related in her 2010 memoir, Just Kids) a few quick shots one ...”

“... the wrong people in the wrong place at the wrong time. The Guardian’s defence correspondent, Richard Norton-Taylor, sends me an email from London which he received from Simon Wren, an MoD press officer. Wren is ranting about my colleagues’ earlier reports on how soldiers haven’t got enough toilet paper, aren’t getting decent food and haven’t got ...”

“... street, outside the Tory White’s club, two gentlemen have been hanged from a lamp-post by the English armée du people, and one of them is Canning. His face is very small.Only Gillray could have rendered the anti-revolutionary mood with such comprehensive hysterics – the whole crowd of figures suspended between fear and fervour, with something weirdly ...”

“... millions of casualties. It was characteristic of him not to see anything odd about adding: ‘An English historian can praise ... Henry VIII without being supposed to condone the beheading of wives.’ Carr’s views and prose style owed much to his experience of the Foreign Office, which he did not leave until his mid-forties. At Cambridge, he excelled as a ...”

“... Did the United States invade Iraq with this objective in mind? The leader of the study group was Richard Perle, who became head – now, after press disclosure of a conflict of interest, he is a mere member – of the Defense Policy Board under Donald Rumsfeld. Another member of the study group was Douglas Feith, now the Pentagon’s Under Secretary for ...”

“... extremism by their teachers.’ And it saw no evidence at all of ‘an organised plot to take over English schools’. But by then the soundbites had gone round the world and back again – Fox News claimed Birmingham was a ‘no-go zone’ for non-Muslims, and that Birmingham’s schools were in crisis, especially Park View. Trustees resigned, staff ...”

“... death, an omission which he came to regret (his account of this episode has been deleted from the English translation). In May 1969 the Minister transferred him back to the Academy’s Institute of Physics in Moscow where his career had begun, with a modest salary to supplement his Academician’s income. Sakharov describes his scientific work from then on as ...”

“... which the form demands that you ‘stalk imaginary beasts like “Existential Marxism” ’). Richard Rorty (in Judt’s book, an embodiment of relativism and nihilism second only to Sartre himself) is appealed to by Khilnani for a more principled repudiation of the history of philosophy itself: a fictive narrative in which ad hoc positions are ...”

“... racing and poetry. One of his favourite pastimes was to challenge friends to find him a piece of English poetry that he didn’t know – sportingly, he warned them off Eliot since he knew all his work by heart. The war interrupted but did not stop his playboy-poet life. In 1940 his unit fled before the advancing Germans to Neufchâtel, where they dug a ...”

“... the British Empire’s eastern division, and given the obsession of all these authors with the English class system (Roland Perry gets so carried away that he repeatedly refers to ‘Lord Victor Rothschild’ in a book published by the ancient firm of Lord Frank Longford) and, finally, given the belief of Anthony Cave Brown that treason is a heritable ...”

“... of his own gaucheries and existential contingencies, other people’s table-talk or Stravinsky’s English (as controversially recorded in the conversation books). But he is still left with an alter ego he would quite like to murder. That need not worry us, however. Our problem is only to accept the exaggerations and selective detail of a style based teasingly ...”

“... gifts with Bach’s great keyboard masterpieces – the Partitas, Toccatas, French and English Suites, Inventions, both books of the Well-Tempered Clavier, most of the Art of Fugue – became almost the core of the repertoire. Brendel, Pollini, Barenboim and Martha Ageriach were consolidating their presence at the same time but none of them had a ...”