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“... ideological war par excellence – a war in which the defeat of the nation would not be too high a price to pay for the victory of certain ideas.’ Like all distinctions based purely on ideas, this is neat but historically somewhat difficult to referee. The cry ‘Better Hitler than Blum’ was, after all, a fairly common one among conservatives who loathed ...”

“... than any philosopher in human history, Aristotle included. That continuous brilliance came at a price: Russell said he thought afterwards that the prolonged effort of concentration had unfitted him for absolutely first-class philosophical work thereafter. From time to time these letters talk of letting someone younger and quicker fill in the gaps which he ...”

“... of real brothers but filled with their surrogates, many based on real people (Toby in Typee, Jack Chase in White-Jacket, Queequeg in Moby-Dick); his attachment to Hawthorne is another example of displaced fraternity. Parker occasionally, and ill-advisedly, uses his knowledge of Melville’s family as a foundation for critical interpretation: he admires ...”

“... also an opportunity to take in complimentary product. A gallery is anywhere with wall space and a price list. It doesn’t have to be a white cube or a turbine hall, an old chapel or a revamped industrial unit. Corporate operations are generous with their holdings: Jim Dine figures you glimpse from an arcade, secured by thick glass and ever-vigilant ...”

“... I liked it. Fortunately, it turned out to be one of the brands acceptable to Bruno. If you ordered Jack Daniel’s, for instance, Bruno would tell you that you were more or less a fool, in thrall to Madison Avenue. Tanqueray gin and Chivas Regal also earned you a rough ride. But Old Grand-Dad was jake with Bruno, a good, unfashionable whiskey. So it was my ...”

“... in the film of Graham Greene’s The Man Within, the ventriloquist Maxwell Frere in Dead of Night, Jack Worthing in The Importance of Being Earnest – tended to make a dark festival out of the business of being everything but the one thing specified. Trust is an actor’s medicine, they spoon it into themselves for comfort, but in Redgrave’s case the ...”

“... the sternest prohibitions of any church, having shunned the Catholic let-out of annulment at a price. But what scriptural authority could these rules claim? Yes, Jesus had said that ‘those whom God hath joined together, let no man put asunder.’ But what about those who had sundered? How was the Church to apply its message of compassion to them?Fisher ...”

“... on boards by a very different species. The ‘money men’, attentive to the company’s share price rather than to its product, moved in as the City of London – once the centre of industrial investment as well as financial services – ramped through its Big Bang and became a casino of debt speculation. It’s a shame that neither author refers to The ...”

“... children to the black-windowed limo that will carry them to school. This otherness comes with a price. ‘Serious money buys separation from city life.’Knowles is an outsider, drifting in the reflected glamour of the streets, registering names and brands. But she is also plotting to get inside. In a restaurant at the Royal Exchange, in the City, she ...”

“... at Nato expansion. Talking points from Kissinger, John Mearsheimer, David Harvey, Bernie Sanders, Jack F. Matlock Jr et al are cited everywhere, along with Russian disinformation (the Russian TV station RT has a huge following on Weibo). Ukraine is often described as a failed state, its only hope of survival to accept its role as a buffer zone (‘the ...”

“... the borrowed cosmologies and hermetic speculations of a young writer who seems to have heeded Jack Spicer’s advice and read the weirdest stuff on which he could lay hands. There were no job offers from Chatto or Faber for this particular poet, but in the Sixties at least there were casual openings in the East London labour market: cutting municipal ...”

“... ruminating on Gellner’s uncharacteristically alarmist reaction to labour unrest and oil price rises in the 1970s speculated, ‘one imagines a Conservative vote in 1979,’ though he would have seemed a likely Labour supporter before that, especially during the Wilson ‘white heat of technology’ years. As with some others of his generation, an ...”

“... an expansionist interpretation too close to the territory of the legislature. But there has been a price to pay – an explosion in human-rights-based litigation. This short act, containing 16 rights of a largely civil and political character, has generated the 2090 pages of Clayton and Tomlinson, the 889 pages of Lester, Pannick and Herberg and the 813 pages ...”

“... To the rat-a-tat-tat​ of a drum, they march on London. Climate protesters? Milk-price complainers taking inspiration from their cousins across the Channel? Some historical re-enactment rump? It must be charity. Look at the cameras. There aren’t enough of them to bring out Boris Johnson, who never failed, in all the years of his mayoralty, to insert himself on the television ‘news where you are’ for London: in hardhat, bicycle helmet, scrumcap squashed down on the finger-flicked golden mopflop of thuggish charm ...”

“... whom would ever feel comfortable with English, he was telling the world, in his own words, about Jack London, Dos Passos, Hemingway, Steinbeck. He was announcing – as his exact contemporary Saul Bellow would announce a decade later in The Adventures of Augie March – a new addition to the canon of American sensibility. But the cost would be ...”