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“... then. Phew.’ Phew, and indeed, gosh. He’s less passive about other things. Except for sex, the self-conscious rock and roll wild man is always ready to make his mark. When Robert Stigwood failed to pay up after a series of concerts, he got trapped on a staircase and kneed by Keith 16 times, one for each grand owed. Not ...”

“... Captain Oates’s departure from Scott’s doomed Antarctic expedition, but Gerald’s taciturn self-erasure seemed more appropriate to my social class and discontents than Oates’s stiff upper lip). I thought that there was nothing at all the matter with having ‘a mind of winter’; I could have lived happily in a world of perpetual cold. So when I ...”

“... spoilt beyond redemption. The second son, the Duke of York who became the reluctant king, was the self-effacing naval officer hampered by an acute stammer. Of the younger two, Gloucester was a solid military man and Kent another playboy. More promiscuous than his elder brother, he was the good time who was had by all, including, it was said, Noël Coward and ...”

“... to have attempted. His earlier writing saw literature and power as locked in reciprocal cycles of self-construction and self-destruction, in which individuals mattered far less than ideological processes. But then he always gave Shakespeare a special place in these processes, and the circulations of power which he found ...”

“... of this kind was the conviction that Pound had undergone a fundamental change of heart in Pisa. Robert Fitzgerald, reviewing the Pisan Cantos in the New Republic in August 1948, was glad to find the poet ‘for the first time expressing a personal desolation and a kind of repentance’. The trick was to imagine a desolation so extreme that, whatever Pound ...”

“... of some financial economists has been more clearly performative. Fischer Black, Myron Scholes and Robert C. Merton’s Nobel Prize-winning option pricing equation of 1973 – which I described two years ago as ‘the single most important breakthrough in the modern mathematical theory of finance’* – didn’t originally describe the market prices of ...”

“... be stretched to encompass an unwavering air of innocence, combined with an evident capacity for self-delusion and, when it suited him, ruthlessness. Naivety is neither good nor bad in itself, and many famous politicians have had their share of it. But unless Blair, far from being the regular guy as which he likes to project himself, is a hypocrite of ...”

“... a realist and a determined unrealist that he could seemingly invent a strange Christian sect of self-mutilated castrates and a cannibal who takes along a green companion on his journey lest he run short of food along the way, and then reveal in an afterword that such practices were well documented in the Russia of the time – which is rather like finding a ...”

“... returned from its Babylonian captivity in Avignon, Rome was a shadow of its ancient imperial self. Perhaps twenty thousand people lived in a city built for a million. Sheep grazed on the Forum, where the great dramas of the Republic had been staged, and on the hills, where warlords and emperors had built their palaces. The streets were no longer ...”

“... concentrate on gun safety and environmental awareness – and those who bought their guns for self-defence, and had no interest in ever leaving Washington. You know who won.One of the things Johnson wanted, and blamed the NRA for not letting him get, was a national registry of all the guns in the country. NRA lobbying was still in its infancy, but when ...”

“... Vegas (1972), the principal manifesto of Post-Modern architecture. There, in a famous opposition, Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown distinguished Modernist design, in which ‘space, structure and programme’ are subsumed in ‘an overall symbolic form’, which they called the ‘duck’, from Post-Modern design, in which ‘space and structure are ...”

“... Early in​ 1971, Robert Hughes, recently appointed as Time magazine’s chief art critic, was ripping out his loft apartment at 143 Prince Street when he received an unexpected visitor. This was Henry Geldzahler, curator of modern art at the Metropolitan Museum. Hughes, probably the most macho and combative critic in his profession, was, by his own account, sweaty, foul-tempered, sore-footed and ‘grey with ingrained dirt ...”

“... Protestant piece of writing: there is the assertion of uncompromising principle, a strong self-justifying theme which runs throughout the sermon, an affirmation of the work ethic (that brutal verb ‘to business’, echoing the anti-Home Rule slogan, ‘Ulster means business’), and finally there is the idea of being born again. Imaginatively, this ...”

“... to the beefiest emu; Eleanor Crow’s dark silhouette on Max Porter’s book (the designer surely self-selecting for the commission) is more muted and harmonious, with no delineation of an eye, not exactly comforting – beak open – but short on actual threat. The Crow of the text comes closer to the Hughesian archetype, smelling to human nostrils of ...”

“... in Letters Concerning the English Nation, was the country of religious toleration, robust self-government, vibrant commerce and advanced ideas. Montesquieu’s dithyrambic praise of the English constitution in The Spirit of the Laws, like Diderot’s for Samuel Richardson (‘O Richardson, Richardson ... I will keep you on the same shelf with ...”