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“... from his wetsuit, however, Deakin appears to dispense with worldly goods. He inherited a copy of George Borrow’s Wild Wales from his great-uncle Joe (who took it from the prison library when he left Parkhurst in 1892, ‘where he was doing time at the age of 20 on the trumped-up charge that he was a dangerous anarchist’), and had been impressed since ...”

“... Froude was mortified but unrepentant. He was used to controversy. James Anthony Froude by George Reid, 1881. The Life was a homemade bomb; the History was a meteorite, a bolide from somewhere remote and unknown. It inspired Tennyson to try to reactivate English verse drama with Queen Mary. It’s huge – two and a half million words in six and a ...”

“... hear that the line ‘Free me, Lord, from evil folk’ (140) is best spoken in the voice of George Bush. Inversion, the possessive, the unpronounceable and an unfortunate word-choice all converge in Psalm 18, where he transforms a dull line in the King James (‘As soon as they hear of me, they shall obey me: the strangers shall submit themselves unto ...”

“... Moon (1999).Brand emigrated to Canada in 1970 with ‘five hundred dollars/and a passport full of sand and winking water’. Toronto was a place where ‘the wealth multiplies in the garbage dumps,/and the quiet is the quiet of thieves.’ But Brand’s prose writings also describe the Black community she found there. ‘Driving North, Driving Home’, from ...”

“... how Tom comes to know it, too, as I’m sure boxing isn’t his thing. 22 January. I’m reading George Steiner’s My Unwritten Books, a series of chapters, some more autobiographical than others, on the books he wishes he’d written. The first section is on the Cambridge scholar and scientist Joseph Needham, microbiologist and expert on China, a man who ...”

“... all of its fleshly temptations and attendant despairs, is an obvious incitement to grace; thus, George Harrison’s Concert for Bangladesh, and Rock Against Racism, and Live Aid, and Farm Aid, and Red Wedge, and Rock the Vote, and Live 8, Coldplay, U2, the late and the later John Lennon, and perhaps almost as many good causes as there are actors. It can ...”

“... Gezira Sporting Club to the west. I learned to count to ten by timing the sunset each night, the sand in the air making the sun a scumbled, smouldering ball, dropping fast and heavily, as if overcome by its own heat. My father had gone ahead of us and been to the Mouski to buy Persian and Turkish rugs, mirrors with gilded and curly frames; brass trays ...”

“... Christ’s fought him until the establishment of UCCA forced Cambridge to take its head out of the sand. Another reason was Cambridge democracy. It was good that all dons were consulted about university business: not so good that they could vote on every issue. What was bad was the paralysis suffered by those trying to effect even minute changes and the ...”

“... Croll in the opening decades of this century. Although Croll’s arguments have been refined by George Williamson and other literary scholars, their significance has not been grasped by historians, who miss the connection between style and content so well understood by Lipsius’s supporters and opponents alike. The new prose was ...”

“... these expeditions. He warned that time to save European culture was running out, ‘not like the sand in a glass, but like the blood of an opened artery’. The ‘common culture of the West’ was being destroyed by book-burning and the exile of European intellectuals. Librarians could no longer be merely custodians. War was being waged against ‘the ...”

“... where the painter simply turns the framed canvas over and works on and in the back declivity with sand; also in public self-presentation – Picasso at a restaurant table with bread-rolls for fingers. He never lost this side, partly because he wanted to do everything and be everything. Braque knew that he couldn’t do everything, and didn’t want to be ...”

“... Arab League. The PAIC meetings attracted people as disparate as the old leftist Palestinian George Habash, members of Hamas, Algerian jihadists and Iraqi Baathists – not to mention Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri. Then, in December 1992, President Bush dispatched the US army to Somalia on what he described as a humanitarian mission. The ...”

“... perfect sentences, despite being flustered. The mot juste every time, whether discussing a George Herbert poem or ordering in a restaurant. His voice was deep, his words perfectly enunciated if a little over-emphasised from years of teaching. He spoke briefly and discreetly, and obviously did not enjoy the sort of attention being trained on him and his ...”

“... light itself turning into money. Stephen’s debt re-emerges during his argument with the poet George ‘A.E.’ Russell (one of his many creditors) as he stakes his fraught bid for literary inheritance to his own reserve and storehouse, the five-vowelled alphabet: A.E.I.O.U. In Burke’s pub and Bella Cohen’s brothel, Stephen is as spendthrift as the ...”

“... than Kissinger’s example suggests. Stretching from Randolph Bourne and William James to George Kennan and William Fulbright, the pragmatic realist tradition in American diplomatic thought held that it was necessary to consider the consequences of ideas and had an outlook characterised by a humane, cosmopolitan restraint in foreign and military ...”