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“... copies, you encounter blurbs the likes of which you’ve never seen before. ‘A marvel,’ Marlon James says. Daisy Johnson tells us that ‘Vuong is rewriting what fiction is supposed to be’ and – forgetting the medium – that ‘it’s a privilege to watch.’ ‘Thank you, Ocean Vuong,’ Michael Cunningham chimes, ‘for this brilliant and remarkable ...”

“... and modest compared to the exaggerations of the Bush Administration and its emissary to Pyongyang, James Kelly. Coming into office when the CIA’s ‘one or two devices’ estimate was nearly a decade old, Bush contrived to hype the threat, while at the same time downplaying the idea that its size made a difference: the North might have two or six or eight ...”

“... in Enfield, North London; Hillingdon, the closest emergency hospital to Heathrow Airport; and the James Paget in Great Yarmouth – declared their beds 100 per cent full on more than half the days in that winter period. Between them, the hospitals in Worcester and neighbouring Redditch had to divert emergency patients elsewhere at least 65 times. At Derriford ...”

“... literature’ and to modernism in particular presents problems. It is as easy to feel that James and Wells are incompatible as it is to reject the notion that Dostoevsky (let alone Oedipus Rex) has any family relationship with the detective story. When we come to Orlando or Pynchon, the conviction of incompatibility remains firm, but the arguments ...”

“... curly wig’ – but she was paid for the story, and in another instance was convicted of perjury. James Kirchick, in Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington (2022), notes some of the ‘code words and allusive phrases’ that journalists once used to suggest that the ‘nation’s top cop was not the model of American masculinity and traditional ...”

“... as a crampon. Granted, ‘My Name Is Prince’ comes out of an old-school black tradition, a James Brown-style boast: ‘On the seventh day he made – me!’ But the tone is all wrong: there’s no self-mockery here; he sounds desperate. On the lamentable rap ‘Sexy MF’, there’s no actual emotion in his voice; it’s about as erotic as the ...”

“... encounter with Europeans: Cook’s arrival and subsequent events, he says, jibe perfectly with prior Hawaiian beliefs, although the English vision of what is happening is very different from the Hawaiian one. What we call the history becomes a metaphor for Hawaiian expectations, and what we call the reality is decoded in terms of established (what we ...”

“... to the 50 per cent turnout threshold … Extend the period of notice unions must give employers prior to industrial action, from the current seven days to 14 days … Provide that industrial action ballot mandates … expire after a four-month period … Introduce new legal requirements relating to the supervision of picketing … for example, that a picket ...”

“... knowledge of what the law required, given that one of the things that defines conspiracy is the prior knowledge that the behaviour in question is unlawful. This would make a successful prosecution very difficult. The Mueller report concludes that investigators ‘did not obtain admissible evidence likely to meet the government’s burden to prove beyond a ...”

“... concern. But in the light of it, we should not be surprised that the traditional process of prior caution – in the words of Lord Woolf, a distinguished former Treasury counsel, ‘if the legality of a course of action was in doubt, it was not adopted. Now it appears to be [be]coming a case of anything is permissible unless and until it is stopped by ...”

“... mainly on the standard Marxist grounds that the freedom of women could only come about through the prior transformation of class society. Thus her book carries on a running critique of those theories – Marxist and Freudian alike – which marginalise women’s concerns in their drive for universal schemes of explanation. Mitchell nevertheless agrees with ...”

“... his erstwhile fiancée, Ethne. All this gets pretty tedious and repetitive and rather Henry James-like in its moral ramifications. It’s gone through so often that one wonders whether the repetition is because the book came out originally in serial form. Each chapter certainly has a subheading: ‘Durrance hears news of Faversham’; ‘The House of ...”

“... Chamberlain’s diaries, which includes an account of his meeting with Hitler at Berchtesgaden prior to the Munich conference in 1938. Blair is struck by how unfairly history has treated Chamberlain. ‘We are taught that Chamberlain was a dupe; a fool, taken in by Hitler’s charm. He wasn’t. He was entirely alive to his badness.’ Chamberlain ...”

“... words of Gerry Canavan, who in 2013 became the first scholar to open them. Butler had been reading James Lovelock and thinking about what would happen if humans migrated to other worlds while continuing to be ‘part of an earth organism in some literal way’: ‘phantom-limb pain’ was a phrase she used in the notes in the boxes. ‘A somehow neurologically ...”

“... His Teens’, Melville intrudes directly to caution the reader – much in the manner of Henry James in Portrait of a Lady, on behalf of the romantically youthful Isabel Archer – not precipitously to judge someone destined to suffer unduly. Paragraphs in which his characters are allowed to exult in their situations tend to conclude with dropped hints of ...”