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“... needed an administration of almost limitless power and quite exceptional stupidity. Then he could be happy, indulging in the lethal, jugulating kind of journalism at which he excels. Of course he would have found some agreeable targets if he had stayed in Britain, but fewer and perhaps less worthy of his envenomed pen. As these essays indicate, he is much ...”

“... out that he has the necessary qualifications for guru status, in that his writings have tended to be cross-disciplinary, obscure and fairly opaque. Yet his work has recently taken on a new clarity and, moreover, he has acknowledged that in his previous studies he had missed an important explanatory variable – namely, ‘power’. In essence, Foucault now ...”

“... school, right there on national television. He was improving the state of the union, person by person. Something like the ‘sovereign’s touch’. This interlude, and several others that added half an hour to the speech, were reminiscent of two TV shows from the 1950s, Queen for a Day and This Is Your Life. An applause meter would elect as ...”

“... and loathing in their work; there has been at least one example of an imagined obituary (by Helmut Heißenbüttel in 1988). But Schirrmacher claimed to have detected something more sinister in Walser’s narrative. Marcel Reich-Ranicki is Jewish, and he and his wife were among the few survivors of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. Schirrmacher drew ...”

“... just 11 per cent of the electoral college, thereby cementing Kinnock in the post. He felt let down by the unions, which had encouraged him to stand and then failed to support him. This sequence of events appears to have confirmed Benn in his suspicion that the goal of capturing the party leadership was a kind of trap for the left. It often appeared within ...”

“... night, where Rachel Maddow and the others were trying to persuade us that it was all beginning to be over, the Trump thing, that it would all be over very soon, because of the investigation, the Mueller thing. As Maddow preached an hour a night, brimming with verve and need, she slipped from glee to bravery and even to ...”

“... Pacific.Contrast the paintings of Julian Cooper, whose exhibition Mind Has Mountains was put on by the Wordsworth Trust from late last year until earlier this month. These, too, are the fruit of an expedition, to Nepal in 1999. They make us look straight at the north faces of 8000-metre mountains. Nothing exists there but rock, ice and snow. In several ...”

“... and blunt expulsion. Israel has always claimed that the Palestinians ran away or were ordered out by their own leaders: and its first prime minister, Ben Gurion, even announced that his country had not expelled a single Arab. Until recently, the inaccessibility of documents in relevant archives discouraged historical research on the matter, and both sides ...”

“... in their son’s hands than in their own. Although Lytton Strachey assailed such pious pomposity by showing that the slenderest of books could sometimes be the weightiest, and that eminence was not necessarily next to Godliness, these pantheons in print were still being constructed on a lavish scale until the Second World ...”

“... wars – Ulysses, The Well of Loneliness – Lady Chatterley’s Lover has long since ceased to be notorious. Unlike them, it has not yet acquired a different kind of fame. But what it does best, better than any other novel of its time, better than most published since, is to describe the modern world as it was, and in some measure still is. In George ...”

“... What​ most distinguishes Dickens’s novels from those by almost any other writer, and from life, is that hardly anything in them ever recedes entirely into the background. Dickens fought long and hard against the human tendency to focus exclusively on what is of immediate pressing concern in any given situation ...”

“... that flatters to deceive. It reminds us of the difference between what we need and what we can be persuaded to want. Raspberry mojitos hint at arcadia, but they’re never going to taste as good as the ones nobody thought to add raspberries to. An ironing board is a plank with a collapsible undercarriage right up until the moment you try to replace the one ...”

“... we never again talk together in laconic?’ Joseph Addison once wrote to Jonathan Swift, by way of inviting him to dinner the next time he happened to be in London. It’s the kind of invitation that might well appeal to Helen DeWitt, an ardent admirer of 18th-century wits and philosophers, and a classicist whose ...”

“... beautiful of all the palaces and the inspiration for Donnafugata in The Leopard, was destroyed by an earthquake in 1968: the courtyards are full of ruined masonry, the garden which was once ‘a paradise of parched scents’ is overgrown by thistles seven feet tall. The ducal palace at Palma di Montechiaro stands gaunt ...”

“... the planking. How long I’d been down and out was anybody’s guess; I’d guess an hour or more by the state of my suit, a foul rag-bag, by the state of my hair, a patty-cake, of my own ripe keck, unless it was the keck of Sandy Traill or Blind Harry, my friends in drink that night, that aye night, every night, in ...”