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“... After a decade of decline, the old, Fabian right of the Labour Party is now so chastened that it is hard to remember that it was once the dominant tradition in British left-wing politics. These two volumes of autobiography bring back its great days: in doing so, they also throw a good deal of unintentional light on the reasons for its fall ...”

“... fled, after brief stops in Switzerland and France, to the Great Soviet Union the boys had heard so much about. Markus remained there for 11 years, becoming ‘Misha’ and acquiring fluent Russian during a Moscow adolescence. The Purges affected the family only indirectly, but in any case his father seemed to lead a charmed life. When the Germans invaded in ...”

“... That at least is how the words must have been intended by their author. Although Giscard’s text attributes the line straightforwardly to Thucydides, it is not the historian himself speaking here, but Pericles, in his celebrated funeral oration for the Athenian dead. Thucydides allows the Athenians to be told that theirs is a true democracy by the ...”

“... frequently); others where what is special is an eerie suburban ordinariness (David Lynch’s small-town America). Doig’s landscapes, to a greater degree than most you might include in an anthology of painted and filmed scenery, suggest a surprising discovery about ...”

“... hand cream, woodland burials, wind turbines and newspaper columns reassuring readers that it’s OK to own a washing machine: a certain version of pastoral is more fashionable than ever. ‘In a time of informational overload,’ John Updike wrote in an introduction to Walden, ‘of clamorously inane and ubiquitous electronic entertainment, and of a ...”

“... is a serious exhibition.1 The pictures themselves signal it with heavy colour: first, black, grey, brown, mud and rust, and, in later pictures strong reds and yellows (when he could afford it – earth colours are cheap). Thick paint – in early pictures so thick that it seems to parody all its Expressionist precursors ...”

“... while the sky and the prairie would divide the picture in the right proportions. Arkhip Kuindzhi’s Landscape: The Steppe of 1890 is the only painting I know which would allow that simple scam to work perfectly. It shows featureless grey sky above almost featureless green steppe, which stretches right out to a distant, dead level horizon. ‘Look,’ it seems ...”

“... It’s all because of our fucking surname,’ exclaimed the exasperated Valerie Hobson, the wife of Jack Profumo, when ‘the Profumo scandal’ was resurrected many years after the event. And perhaps she was right, though that cannot be the reason for their son, David Profumo, once more resurrecting it ...”

“... made famous; she also insistently communicates childlikeness of countenance and demeanour, going so far as to caption one photograph: ‘Sofia Marie changed her dark brown hair to blonde because it looks more angelic’. Mass communications, and their prime instrument, the photograph, have proved crucial in the history of ...”

“... from Dreyfus, we can see what Proust meant. Yet the Iraq crisis had been unfolding before Dr David Kelly’s death – whatever Lord Justice Hutton’s inquiry concludes – and the sense that Iraq did not cause but nevertheless represents a crisis of the Labour Party has been with ...”

“... and Freddie Fredericks, Frank Attercliffe’s aging and alcoholic mentor, and co-author with him of Pindar’s Weekend Round-up, a sports column on the Northern Post. After the match, in the Buckingham Bar, Fredericks introduces Frank to Phyllis Gardner – eyes ...”

“... in front of anyone he knew, and I tried to make him look as good as possible,’ Hemingway wrote. So wide was the margin between master and pupil, both in musculature and in technique, that Hemingway could without difficulty refrain from doing his opponent any damage. Lewis, he felt sure, wanted to see Pound hurt. He was careful not to oblige. ‘I never ...”

“... My daughter and I voted early. It was the most simple ballot-paper on earth, but still, I was so nervous I had to check and recheck, making sure the X was going in the right box. Zinging with anxiety, we drove down to Edinburgh on Thursday evening to watch the results with friends in Marchmont. ‘Yes’ posters again well outnumbered ‘No’. The ...”

“... between agricultural slumps. The primary concern of a large tenant farmer like Street’s father wasn’t the bottom line: ‘One didn’t farm for cash profits, but did one’s duty by the land.’ In 1911 the Streets had a row. It’s a common pattern in the agricultural ...”

“... not justice. The wonder is not that governments fall far short of their ambitions, but that they so often succeed in maintaining good order and allowing their citizens to look after themselves in peace. Idealists have retorted that human nature is what it is only because our institutions are corrupt; the state can play much more than a defensive role. In ...”