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“... was bestowed still the greatest honour that could have come my way.15 February. Good reviews for Richard Wilson’s production of Sarah Kane’s Blasted at Sheffield. In such a violent play, though, I find myself spiked by my literalness (as I remember being by Mark Ravenhill’s Shopping and Fucking). If a character is mutilated on stage, blinded, say, or ...”

“... can be something not just for right-wing agendas.’ He was followed by a woman who read a Howl-style poem about the injustices of Wal-Mart. The speakers mentioned Rosa Parks, Malcolm X, Gloria Steinem, The Beatles. Dennis Kucinich, a small, birdlike man with strong views and sharp claws, the only candidate for the nomination who had voted ...”

“... More than 70 per cent of the population was illiterate and of the rest only a tiny elite could read English. In October 1968, during lavish celebrations to commemorate the ten years of dictatorship as a ‘decade of development’, students in Rawalpindi demanded the restoration of democracy; soon Student Action Committees had spread across the ...”

“... through the apprehension of the people trying to secure power over the country.As preparation I read the last entry Dominic Cummings posted on his blog, from June 2019, just before he became Boris Johnson’s senior adviser – his main job, we assume, to win the next election for his boss’s new, Faragist Conservative Party as effectively as he managed ...”

“... fronting both magazines at the same time. In June 1974, two months before Watergate drove his boss Richard Nixon from office, Newsweek portrayed Kissinger as ‘Super K’ in full hero outfit, muscles rippling, cape swirling. He knew it was too good to last: those whom the gods wish to destroy they first dress up as Superman. Gewen describes the absurdity of ...”

“... Samuels’. Then Tory rumours reached him of a potential conflict of interest scandal. One way to read it was as a case of insider dealing. The other way was that Marconi had got the contract only because Herbert Samuel was doing a favour to his fellow Jews, who were all in league to rip off the British taxpayer. Naturally, Belloc and Cecil pushed the second ...”

“... is pervasive. ‘PC Burton said he knew Jones as a convicted pervert,’ we read in an early newspaper report – the word trenchant but fastidious, declining to engage in the niceties of just what he was convicted of. The distaste it conveys is summed up by the awful Winterton when he says: ‘I prefer the word “pervert” to ...”

“... Michel Pastoureau. Now, as I stagger numbly round my house in San Francisco, hardly able to read or eat or think, I don’t know when I’ll get back to it. Too bad, because, in any normal time, the book would be one worth mulling over. Pastoureau argues that over the centuries stripes (and striped clothing) have gone from being ‘bad’ to ...”

“... which nobody would rationally prefer. The objection fails because it is not appropriate to read ‘can’ in the sense of ‘historically feasible’. Some of the more utopian aspects of Marxism should be rejected on the grounds that they are biologically impossible: it is pointless to condemn capitalism on the grounds that not everybody is a Leonardo ...”

“... Anderson was backed by Robin Blackburn, ‘a beautiful, big, shock-headed youngster’ who had read Sartre and de Beauvoir in the French. Chubby, chummy and balding, imperturbably good-humoured and everybody’s pal, Inglis has a distinct resemblance to Bob Hoskins, the interfering busybody and cheer-leader of the current British Telecom ads. He may ...”

“... I dipped again into my Wharton to see what was coming up on the next leg of the walk. ‘I read the other day in a book by a fashionable essayist that ghosts went out when electric light came in. What nonsense! The writer, though he is fond of dabbling, in a literary way, in the supernatural, hasn’t even reached the threshold of his subject.’Too ...”

“... mention at all in a skimpy retrospect of his African tour of February 1960. Quite a few entries read like a summary of events drawn up by someone else. Not often do you get the feeling of being there yourself or of learning something new about how it went, as you do on almost every page of the Crossman diaries. Only the odd languid wisecrack convinces you ...”

“... Among the houses where Thomas was invited was that of the Pringsheims, whose daughter Katia he had read about in a magazine. Her father was a wealthy mathematics 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 ...”

“... think of as normal classic names: Simon, Mark, Peter, Andrew, Paul, Martin, Michael, Stephen, Richard, Robert, David. Girls’ names remained more modish: some Sarahs, Anns and Elizabeths and even some residual Marys, but also plenty of Janets, Jackies, Lisas and Debbies, who soared and plummeted through the bestseller lists in the space of a couple of ...”

“... generals are said to have been horrified when Sargent opened Thayer’s valise. According to Richard Murray of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the prototype garment resembled an old hunting jacket, trailing strips of coloured cloth and daubed with patches of colour that reflected Thayer’s interest in harlequin costumes. It’s not clear whether ...”