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“... is wearing away health and social services already overburdened by an ageing population, while the black economy grows, recycling its income via the minicab, pub, tanning-studio, sauna/ brothel, loan-shark, flat-letting and ‘security’ businesses. The Daily Record (‘two million readers in Scotland’), a nauseous tabloid, carries stories – written ...”

“... undertaking that even Carlyle might have thought displayed commendable industry and endurance (Ian Campbell, who provides this final volume with a graceful introduction, first joined the team in 1964). The unusual decision, taken at the outset, to combine Carlyle’s correspondence with that of his wife has paid off handsomely. As Rosemary Ashton observed ...”

“... word in the song, and about the words that are missing from it: The song never says that she’s black, and it’s his best Civil Rights song because it never says she’s black. Everybody knows she’s black and it has nothing to do with knowing the newspaper story. You just know that ...”

“... music always returns. The outside world now mainly sees Protestant Belfast in terms of Ian Paisley Snr, a man who believes that bridges are built primarily to let the Devil in. But the bridges of Morrison’s music have connected Hyndford Street outwards to a strange semi-mystical realm of angels, children and (ultimately) the Calvinist Nirvana of ...”

“... In 1972 the final issue of Ian Hamilton’s Review was given over to a symposium on ‘The State of Poetry’. Only fifteen years on, it has the flavour of a yellowed historical document. The symposium’s tone is embattled: it finds enemies and traitors on every bookshelf, with the whole future of English poetry threatened by sinister forces ...”

“... well share something with earlier singers of the unhomely and uncanny, from Thomas De Quincey to Ian Curtis. His Earth, like theirs, is a purgatory where anything can happen and no one can leave: ‘My brother is hanging from the branches/Hanging or swimming/Our T-shirts absolutely blaze.’ He entitled his second book Flies because they thrive on dead ...”

“... figure that he has if he were not immediately and locally real to the audience as he stands in black in the king’s presence chamber. After that moment he can be or become anything the reader or viewer fancies. Timon of Athens, on the other hand, seems to have been present only as an idea to Shakespeare from the very beginning, with the result that he ...”

“... and a coffee-coloured Britain. Tolerance does not require that every Englishman should have a black man for his neighbour or that every Asian should forget his cultural identity. Instead we must acknowledge and understand the existence of social pluralism. It is not surprising that the Times’s Englishman turns out not to include Asians or blacks. What ...”

“... There is, throughout these essays, an interest in symbolic occasions. Three black convicts come out to sweep the Alabama street where a group of Civil Rights demonstrators is standing. A girl in Professor Adorno’s classroom in Frankfurt takes off all her clothes as he discourses on the dangers of spontaneity. Lee Harvey Oswald is ...”

“... Ian Watt’s The Rise of the Novel,* which Michael McKeon energetically bids to transcend, gave us, whatever else, the clear image and serviceable concept: ‘formal realism’, the growth of ‘the middle class’, secularised Protestant Man proudly bearing the standard of an aggressive ‘individualism’ – on Crusoe’s hard-won island as in the socioeconomic landscape of contemporary England ...”

“... interweaves the public and the private. In contrast with these two short biographies, Conrad Black has produced a magnum opus. The detail is often revealing, yet the book would surely have gained from tighter editing and, in contrast to Renshaw’s volume, the wood sometimes gets lost in the trees. Like all students of Roosevelt, ...”

“... an undercover psychological warfare unit working closely with MI6, Wallace was put in charge of black propaganda operations. These consisted in feeding a host of alarmist stories about the IRA to the British press – wading through them, one begins to wonder, glumly, how far one can trust anything the British press writes about Ireland. In 1972 Harold ...”

“... independence.Such nonsense! It’s still humiliating that anyone accepted that bedtime story. As Ian Patel writes in We’re Here because You Were There, decolonisation ‘was from a British perspective uncontrollable, unwanted and unexpected. Direct imperial rule was dissolved largely in two currents of anti-colonial nationalism in Asia in the 1940s and in ...”

“... by a narrating ‘I’ and a talking horse who paraphrases Heidegger. To find Dorn, the Black Mountaineer and poet of the American Dream Post-Modernised, honouring Davie, Larkin’s one-time ally and fellow Movementeer, a native of Barnsley who retired to Devon, is puzzling only if one doesn’t acknowledge the range of Davie’s work. Since most ...”

“... Hurricane Bird; Gaviota Oscura; Gaviota Monja; Oiseau Fou; Touaou. But when the keen birdwatcher Ian Fleming needed a name that sounded as ordinary as possible, he had to look no further than the title page of Bond’s great work. Why does the name of an actual ornithologist sound so right as the name of a fictional spy? Why couldn’t Fleming have used ...”