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“... your Prospero.Marsyas was flayed for not knowing his place. Harrison has been luckier: school may not have accommodated his talent (‘He possesses something of the poetical imagination,’ his final report said, ‘but suffers from the waywardness of that gift’), but he put it to use, eventually making his way from Leeds to Broadway.He was helped by ...”

“... new book, The Grass Is Greener, causes a fatal synaptic meltdown in anyone who reads it, and only Richard Anger, maverick bookseller, and Lauren Furrows, emotionally timid neurologist, can stop the epidemic. Balancing the figure of Gary, for whom subject matter is everything (he admires the Monet on his wall because the artist ‘painted pictures of flowers ...”

“... is imperceptible, and those who sacrifice themselves in the interest of imperceptible improvements may not even receive the praise normally due selfless behaviour. The real-world example Olson gave was farmers in the American grain market. If a selfless farmer, worried about the suffering of his colleagues because of depressed prices, decided to lower his own ...”

“... and caricatures. The places where he was stationed – Paris, Auteuil, Neufchâteau – may have helped him develop a taste for the Old World illustrations used in parts of Cinderella and Fantasia; he may only have been educated up to the age of 15, but he wasn’t unworldly. In 1920, having returned to a job as a ...”

“... The response to ‘A Matter of Light’, as the draft was called, was not encouraging. ‘I may be totally wrong,’ Williams’s agent, Marie Rodell, wrote, ‘but I don’t see this as a novel with high potential sale. Its technique of almost unrelieved narrative is out of fashion, and its theme to the average reader could well be ...”

“... end up on the same side as the Israelis. In America there are many voices – Henry Kissinger, Richard Perle, Congressman Les Aspin, among many others – who are today demanding openly what Eden, in the case of Nasser, and his colleagues could only resolve in most secret conclave: the destruction of Saddam Hussein, the old war aim of Khomeini, and the ...”

“... Becket shows us a man whose origins, like William’s, were not of the highest: his father ‘may have been in textiles’. Like William, Thomas owed his rise, not to inheritance, but to his being sent to the household of a distant and more powerful relative: that of Theobald, Archbishop of Canterbury. As a clerk, though not yet a priest, and Chancellor ...”

“... occupation and living wage (a black-humoured task dreamt up for my convalescence by the well-named Richard Gott) arrived 22 years late: in 1968 I sent a memorandum to the then editor proposing a daily warts-and-all profile of a man or woman lately dead – in other words, a Not-the-Times obituary column. Now it is universally agreed in the four serious dailies ...”

“... New Economic Policy, which rewarded the individual peasant and worker for his or her enterprise. (Richard Pipes’s new hook on the Russian Revolution disagrees, and paints Lenin as the inaugurator of the oppression of the peasants and workers.) The Revolution was betrayed by Stalin, who established the very unsocialist central command economy, with its ...”

“... Oxford’s spell, or under the spell of an Oxford he never quite managed to locate. The young Ved may have been a trifle gauche and smarmy but the old Mehta is quite proud of him. We hear of the boy’s lively debating skills, his conscientiousness, his charm, and we are left in no doubt that, after a somewhat shaky start, he was eventually moving in the ...”

“... but enforcing, their new, ‘feudal’ rights over the lands of their leading subjects. Lawyers may have a weakness for tidying away messy realities, but they cannot generally create an intellectual model out of nothing, or force its adoption if it is too far out of step with contemporary norms. Reynolds meets the first point by arguing that the theory of ...”

“... chapter on comparative cleanliness which ends with the judgment that ‘France and England may be ranked amongst the tolerably clean nations, England taking the lead: but real cleanliness is not general in either ... The majority prefer a modest degree of dirtiness as being more conducive to their true comfort.’ There is a mass of later secondary ...”

“... of course, it’s Banks up-front, Major on the bench and Mellor for the early bath.) For a time, Richard Attenborough was club chairman. Viewed from the bleak kingdom of Don Revie up in Leeds, these ‘southern softies’ never stood a chance. It was Leeds, though, who lost – narrowly and unluckily – to Chelsea in that 1970 final. According to Alan ...”

“... still dressed in “couture” and the poor struggle along dismal pavements with little but C&A or Richard Shops to sustain them.’ The customers of C&A would surely be surprised to find themselves described as ‘the poor’ and most people expect to go along a pavement to get to the shops. Yet, despite her misplaced sympathy for the huddled masses in ...”

“... it drew on still earlier work in social science (Sorokin, Andreski and Janowitz), social policy (Richard Titmuss’s rather naive equation of ‘the Dunkirk spirit’ with social reform, for example, is now very familiar) and Medieval studies. In the early Sixties at Edinburgh University, I launched special subjects on ‘The War and the Welfare State in ...”