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“... Dr Rae suggest that ‘public school headmasters are political animals.’ But he is less than frank in his characterisation of the species. ‘Whatever other qualities of intellect and character they possess ... they have stamina, an instinct for survival, a polite ruthlessness, a shrewd judgment of men and opportunities and a flair for identifying ...”

“... will undermine our system of government, and make participants in government less prepared to give frank if unpopular advice. People might take the opposite view: that if one could only be sure of being reported five years later, it might add incentive to the delivery of frank and unpopular advice. I have in mind one of ...”

“... a class that if only William I had died earlier, the history of Europe would have been different? Frank Lorenz Müller has made me less certain of that. His excellent biography of Frederick William – one part biography, one part revisionism and one part cultural history – offers a subtler, more nuanced and less emotional account of ‘Our Fritz’. In a ...”

“... administrators or bored biologists. In one of Robertson’s papers an ecologist called Frank identifies a species of grass by describing it as ‘kinda wispy’ – in doing so he also increases his bank’s store of mitigation credits. As Robertson points out, ‘there are over 2700 different species of vascular plants in the Chicago region, and ...”

“... Years of Solitude such an enlarging experience. Translation upsets expectation, it extends the field of comparison, it forces even the sluggardly to re-evaluate and to re-contextualise. A period of good writing has to be a period of good and abundant translating also. The fact that we’re not presently living in the latter leads me to qualify the large ...”

“... Margaret Sullavan (‘a very fucked-up lady’) before? Do I care that her best performance was in Frank Borzage’s Three Comrades? At any rate, it’s interesting to learn that her wretched biography, written by her daughter Brooke Hayward, was entitled Haywire – much like the heading under which Bob Woodward interred John Belushi. I remember being given a ...”

“... the complex counterpoint of similarity and difference, that describe the shifting and contested field of black music. He shows, for example, that far from being simply an American successor to rhythm-and-blues, hip hop was born in the Bronx out of Jamaican sound-system culture. This intra-racial, diasporic borrowing has its own history in the transatlantic ...”

“... headed by Cole, looked into some odd murders in New York and South Dakota, and Sheriff Truman – Frank, not Harry: for unknown reasons the original actor wasn’t signed up, so Robert Forster filled in as his brother instead – reopened Cooper’s case files after receiving premonitory information back in Twin Peaks. The storylines chugged patiently ...”

“... of Oz: A Parable on Populism’ (1964), Henry Littlefield, a high-school teacher, interpreted L. Frank Baum’s novel as an extended metaphor for American politics in the 1890s. He argued that Baum, who in 1888 moved to the territory that became South Dakota, sympathised with the plight of the region’s farmers and was influenced by the views of a man he ...”

“... year’s auction included a brochure from a Charleston estate sale of 1859, offering ‘229 Rice Field Negroes, An Uncommonly Prime and Orderly Gang’. From the 1830s came a silk handkerchief, an Abolitionist keepsake from England, with a picturesque and sentimental vignette of a black mother rocking her baby under a palm-tree; the inscription is ‘Negro ...”

“... not the world, was Chatwin’s oyster. One of the strengths of this memoir is that it narrows the field: Susannah Clapp is not for traipsing round West Africa or Tibet, preferring to work the Chatwin itineraries elegantly and sparsely into what is very much a home-turf story, from Sheffield, to Birmingham, Wiltshire, London, Edinburgh, Gloucestershire, Wales ...”

“... and middle Seventies, when the Left took vast strides forward in the industrial and political field, Wright and his supporters in the security services threw their considerable influence and energies into the domestic political fray. Caution was thrown aside in March 1974 after a minority Labour administration was elected in the middle of an unstoppable ...”

“... against Empire (1954). It was a remarkable work of literary detection, which still dominates the field. Some Blake readers have felt that his attribution of correspondence between text and contemporaneous events was over-literal (as well as hazardous), and Jon Mee is one of these. Mee’s contexts are less literal: they concern the characteristic ...”

“... adventurer James Skinner, who built it ‘in fulfilment of a vow made while lying wounded on the field of battle’. (Skinner’s equally remarkable contemporary Begum Samru – a Kashmiri dancing-girl turned army commander – built a Catholic church in similar style at Sardhana, with two Wren-like spires flanking the dome.) Skinner did not come seamlessly ...”

“... so nice that he’ll always be someone’s boyfriend, so bland that he’ll always be jilted; Frank, the son who leaves his father, the cop who leaves the force, and the man who first leaves Larkin; Blue, the hustler everybody wants who becomes a travelling Aids activist and so earns a place in heaven somewhere between the Archangel Gabriel and Johnny ...”