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“... the sophomore year of high school; precocious philosophical peers like Allan Bloom (born 1930) and Richard Rorty (born 1931) were educated on the same programme. ‘I’ll really know what to do in Chicago when I get there,’ Sontag writes after recounting more adventures in the bars of San Francisco and Sausalito. ‘I’ll begin right by going out and ...”

“... the 1920s into the 1940s, Greene and several of his talented male contemporaries were working, in English fiction, related veins of anxiety and intelligence, anger and danger, sex and sensibility, and contrasting an ironic private humanity with the petty vanities and great harm of established power. Their narrative frequently centred on the difficulty of ...”

“... the right-wing think tank Policy Exchange, whose funding sources are a jealously guarded secret, Richard Walton, the retired head of counter-terrorism at the Metropolitan Police, accused XR of trying to break up ‘democracy and the British state’. In January, City of London police put XR on a list of groups said to have extremist ideologies; they were ...”

“... character of Höfgen. This is something that Mann in his diaries and his letters, as published in English, makes no mention of, and I can find no reference to it in the many biographies of Mann. Nonetheless, it seems clear that Klaus used a small part of his father in his attempt to dramatise political treachery for the sake of artistic success. In ...”

“... on poetic subjects.Writing on poetic subjects or writing poetry? You must have been good at English. You must have been a star at essays.Well, not quite a star. But the masters thought I was pretty good and so I came to see myself in this role. You know – take a look at my sensibility which is surely superior to yours. By all means clatter off to your ...”

“... With considerably less irony, indeed with no irony at all, two well known historians, Richard Neustadt and Ernest May, coauthored an entire book, Thinking in Time: The Uses of History for Decision Makers, premised on that rhetorical question and its obvious answer. Their method is to reconsider policy crises of the past and to analyse the thinking ...”

“... had vanished: ‘Now expect Peace Congress which big four control will do nothing [for Ireland] if English oppose. Also expect League of Nations Scheme will exclude probability of successful appeal there.’ Another equally unrealistic hope temporarily replaced the earlier optimism about the Peace Conference – that Britain might ‘offer [the US] President ...”

“... on the Vienna system, she pointed out that French makes a distinction lost in our all-purpose English word, between sécurité, denoting the subjective condition of feeling safe, and sûreté, the objective operations of the police: the former encompassing welfare systems, in popular language today la sécu; the latter indicating repressive agencies of ...”

“... to spring a trap in our minds. ‘Rural England is where urban England now dumps its rubbish,’ Richard Girling writes. ‘Here it tips everything from garbage in landfills to fridges in ponds, broken cars and surplus people.’1 The Daily Mail says there is a plague of rats in Britain as a result of the lack of care taken in refuse collection. The ...”

“... finds a shed skin, as long as a child is tall; Arne hears a cat sing ‘Watch the sunrise’ in English. The dry rattle of the sound kalikalikalikalik clicks through the text. The plagues progress to human sacrifice: an extreme death-metal band is found murdered in the woods in what appears to be a ritual killing. The sexy journalist, Jostein, races to the ...”

“... I noticed that the lakeside venue supplied free coffee to customers brave enough to purchase ‘an English muffin’. GET IT DONE. Beyond the underpass with the satiric graffito of Boris Johnson shovelling shit for St Patrick’s Day, I crossed a set of ancient tracks, the Thamesmead Ridgeway and the Green Chain Walk. Here was the first indication I had ...”

“... her to the attention of the editors at Partisan Review, who began publishing her criticism: Richard Wright, Faulkner, Hart Crane, the Goncourts – Hardwick could turn her hand to almost anything. When Philip Rahv met her, he was struck by her gumption. He asked her what she thought of Diana Trilling: ‘Not much.’ ‘I weighed about ten pounds ...”

“... at several schools and colleges, and this volume ends just as he is resigning as professor of English at Amherst. He enjoys offering sage counsel, and he’s good at it too (his letter to his daughter about how to write an essay is the best thing I’ve read on that ticklish subject). Having said that, he is also aware of his tendency to gravitate towards ...”

“... professor; he had been a friend of Wagner’s and parties in the house were attended by Mahler and Richard Strauss. ‘One has no thought of Jewishness in regard to these people,’ Thomas wrote to his brother, ‘one senses only culture.’ Once married, Thomas and Katia Mann lived in splendour in Munich. ‘The Manns,’ Reich-Ranicki wrote, ‘would go to ...”

“... move, part of a Saudi-UAE effort to counter what they present as Iranian influence. As Richard Sokolsky and Aaron David Miller put it in an article for Politico, The crown prince engineered this dispute not to punish Qatar for its financing of terrorism (a hypocritical comment coming from the Saudis, whose own citizens have provided funding to ...”