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“... I’ve always had a soft spot for George III, starting all of forty years ago when I was in the sixth form at Leeds Modern School and reading for a scholarship to Cambridge. The smart book around that time was Herbert Butterfield’s The Whig Interpretation of History, which took the 19th century to task for writing history with one eye on the future, and in particular for taking as the only path through the past the development of democratic institutions ...”

“... and Cruikshank and Trollope, a slew of Americans and a galaxy of European stars from Balzac and George Sand to Turgenev and Musil, is to leave this reader at least stunned with admiration for the sympathy, originality and fresh turn of phrase constantly shown. Just as the short story is the ideal length for Pritchett as creative writer, so the longish ...”

“... pen names and spoof attributions figure centrally in the genre’s history, from Scott, to George Eliot, to Kilgore Trout. According to the massive, nine-volume Dictionary of Anonymous and Pseudonymous English Literature there are, largely speaking, only three reasons for masked authorship, all prudential: ‘Generally the motive is some form of ...”

“... of England and the old Empire to talk freely to mad old Indians. Change involved the right of George Bernard Shaw to say that the long lying-in-state of the dead queen was a danger to public health, and for the slow emergence of figures such as D.H. Lawrence and E.M. Forster, who would dramatise in novels the end of restriction and the beginning of new ...”

“... write good novels unless they already have some bend in their imagination, as did Hemingway, Orwell and Joan Didion, towards self-excavation. The urge may hide itself, but you can see it in their language: the words don’t just arrive; they are bred in the bone and the actions they perform are specific to that writer. This is what we call style, and ...”

“... refrains in Hardy’s criticism for the last ten years. Her starting-point here would seem to be George Eliot’s contention that the novel’s highest end is the extension of human sympathy. This noble purpose is the goal to which all the novel’s art (its ‘form’) is directed. Hardy deliberately employs the vague word ‘feeling’ in preference to ...”

“... travel book – the journal of a solo sail round Britain – Raban recast his material as fiction. George Grey, the book’s hero, a spiritual descendant of George Bowling in Coming Up for Air, returns from a twenty-year African odyssey to find his native island horribly transformed. Britain under Thatcher is a ...”

“... to follow. But Two Thousand Million Man-Power stops dead, for no apparent reason, shortly after George V’s funeral procession in London on 28 January 1936. It thus omits a key event in the story of the bomber’s increasing supremacy, the Spanish Civil War, which broke out in July (Guernica was hit on 26 April 1937). The focus, towards the end of the ...”

“... case. Taped interviews with eight or so concerned onlookers (some of them, like Christopher Ricks, George Steiner and Gore Vidal, younger candidates for sagedom) are cut and rearranged to give a chronological sense of each career, but also a whiff of the blood and cordite of intellectual warfare. The purpose is not quite literary biography or portraiture, for ...”

“... authority. You can hear the putter of hope and the crank of disgust in that very plain speech. Orwell would have liked it – its lilt, its flow and its moral transparency. But it is the quantity of solid civic ambition that resounds now. People who cry out for change in the NHS always cry out against the past. They see only ugliness and failure, never ...”

“... of Utopian designs. One late 19th-century approach, exemplified by Ruskin in his Guild of St George and by William Morris in his News from Nowhere, sought salvation in a world of rustic, artsy-craftsy, thatched and timbered, anti-machine socialism: ‘small is beautiful’ before its time. Another, more pragmatic coterie, presided over by Ebenezer Howard ...”

“... whose best older celebrants have been men of letters who were men of action, including Yeats, Orwell and Foot, rather than academics who make a preening performance of not really being academics, like John Fraser and Edward Said. Fraser on this author cannot match Said’s remarkable amalgam of souped-up abstractionism and overpowering factual ...”

“... I am still alive and well.’ The piquancy of this novel is that it must be ‘about’ George Lukacs (born von Lukacs). Publicly, Lukacs is still the Marxist theoretician best-known and most cited in the West (although Brecht and Benjamin are catching up with him). Sennett uses the novel’s penetrative licence to explore the pathology of Marxist ...”

“... by the release of Windows 95, the largest bit of media marionetting since Apple ‘repurposed’ Orwell, but it also saw the upgrading of Gates’s increasingly inescapable public persona. From retiring computer geek (who turned his company into a market leader with the skill of the most venal corporate raider) to folksy patrician of next-century information ...”

“... with flawed personalities and flyblown reputations – into the stuff of compelling biography. Orwell once claimed that everything he wrote had a socialist purpose. It could almost be said of Pimlott that everything he writes bears witness to his faith in the continuing validity and importance of mainstream Labour politics. In True Blues the authors remark ...”