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“... bit as relentlessly as Alan Clark fought for animals in leg traps. He took on civil servants, Post Office mandarins, and was even prepared to defy the Queen herself. Then one day Harold Wilson summoned him and put a stop to the whole business. The Queen’s head remains to this day. In Tony Benn’s memoirs it is difficult to find a single other ...”

“... our freedom. This brings us to another bee in Waugh’s bonnet. He disapproved strongly of the use post-war Britain made of her freedom. Gallagher speaks of the ‘defence of the upper classes and the offensive against the lower which characterised Waugh’s post-1945 career’. The campaign cannot have done a lot to endear ...”

“... and technological danger conspire to break up two families, throwing them into a ‘malevolent, post-electrical silence’. Though the electrocution and the couple-swap are carefully handled, Moody keeps a chilly distance from his adult characters. Rather than examine their feelings directly, he prefers to offer eloquent sumaries: ‘Like so many of the ...”

“... years on, HMS Pinafore is still afloat. Refitted and relaunched by directors like Joseph Papp, Jonathan Miller, Ken Russell and Mark Savage as post-copyright, post-D’Oyly Carte G&S, not only Pinafore, but The Pirates of Penzance, The Mikado and Princess Ida too have been successfully ...”

“... It is odd how much decades matter. The Twenties evoke an unmistakable image of self-consciously post-war modernity and frivolity; the Thirties of ideological polarisation in the face of the twin challenge of depression and dictatorship; the Forties of plain living and high thinking about the world after Hitler; the Fifties of affluence and complacency and the end of ideology ...”

“... Bombyx mori, because of how he munched his way steadily through his food and how, waking from a post prandial nap, he burst into life and, ‘flapping his hands, flitted about his library, like a startled moth’. Nothing in this lengthy excursus is unduly far-fetched, though not all of it seems worth the fetching. More engaging is a visit to the village of ...”

“... missions to Prague; but before long, for some reason or other (ancestral taint? mal du siècle? post-imperial decadence?), his purpose wavers. Soon Peterley, once more the flâneur and womaniser, is actually wasting the time of Jan Masaryk, whose country is in its death-agonies, by petty jealousies over a girl. There is, he decides despairingly, only one ...”

“... nursing’. Lodge, however, is not your wilder type of structuralist, and has nothing to do with post-structuralism, which Carey (though not Lodge) identifies as ‘the Marxist branch’ of structuralism. So Lodge concerns himself only with what he calls ‘classical’ structuralism, and this at any rate is a relief. All the same, Lodge’s claims for that ...”

“... China and – in the phrase of anguished Americans who backed the wrong horse – he lost China. Jonathan Fenby starts his important new biography, the first of substance for a quarter of a century, in Xi’an in 1936 when Chiang, after his 50th birthday, was preparing to bash the Communists. Having ignored the local armed forces’ evident reluctance to ...”

“... a troublemaker and we don’t want him here.’ This minor incident goes unmentioned in Jonathan Eig’s new biography of King, of course. But it illustrates a theme to which Eig returns several times. People of every political persuasion now claim King as a forebear. But during his lifetime, King and the civil rights movement aroused considerable ...”

“... think that, you might as well think that the setting of a car-bomb is ‘surely [sic], at this “post-political” stage, an art-form’, and Said does. The aestheticising of conflagration, carnage, bombs, gun-fire, has a quaint history which goes back to Nero. It has exercised a certain type of Romantic sensibility from Sade to Mailer, and some bards of ...”

“... thrown up in pursuit of it – that led to the widespread shift of direction signalled by French post-structuralism. It is simplifying matters to treat the prefix ‘post-’ as suggesting any kind of straightforward theoretical advance beyond the structuralist paradigm. At most, it is a label of convenience adopted in the ...”

“... man’, in the words of Max Hastings, who met him while writing a biography of his brother Jonathan. Yet Netanyahu can hardly be avoided, or his survival skills denied. If he is not forced out of office on corruption charges before July 2019, he will be Israel’s longest-serving prime minister, overtaking Ben-Gurion. Israeli democracy, the marketing ...”

“... Colm Tóibín calls it ‘a tour de force … a novel of immense power and scope, reminiscent of Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections and Don DeLillo’s Underworld’. Tóibín is also the novel’s UK publisher, under the Tuskar Rock imprint, which may have something to do with it, but does Christos Tsiolkas’s prose really bear comparison with ...”

“... of human harmony and a symptom of a peaceful and abundant society – better the impulse to post pictures of your balls than the impulse to evangelise or bomb. When Thomas Pynchon asked the same question in Gravity’s Rainbow (‘What’s it all been for, the murdering seas, the gangrene winters and starving springs, our bone pursuit of the ...”