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“... meticulous. At one end of the spectrum lurk the sex murderers in The Comfort of Strangers (1981), Robert and Caroline, whose actions lead their victim’s girlfriend to surmise that ‘the imagination, the sexual imagination’, embodies ‘a powerful single organising principle’ which distorts ‘all relations, all truth’. The incestuous children in The ...”

“... and Brazzaville). It will doubtless be the same in 2002 – which is why Chirac receives Robert Mugabe in such splendour at the Elysée, conscious that Zimbabwe’s 14,000 troops in the Congo make him a key player in such marchandise. Not that France has a monopoly on playing Machiavelli in Africa: Herman Cohen, Clinton’s Assistant Secretary of ...”

“... fact that Mandelson has proved himself peculiarly bad at managing his own political career cannot alter the fact that he had, as Donald Macintyre makes clear, an instinctive grasp of the dynamics of the new media-led democracy, a skill certainly needed to pull off the Houdini-like feat of rescuing Labour from the state to which it had sunk in the early ...”

“... novels began to be rediscovered in the 1970s. While researching his screenplay for Chinatown, Robert Towne came across Ask the Dust and took up Fante’s cause. He optioned the novel and persuaded Francis Ford Coppola to do the same for the book Fante was then working on, The Brotherhood of the Grape (1977). In 1978, the poet Charles Bukowski mentioned ...”

“... the country’s emerging counter-culture, including Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, LeRoi Jones and Robert Creeley. It also ran a selection of the early work of a maverick graduate student in English at the University of Tulsa, Ted Berrigan. Berrigan was soon accompanying Brainard and his fellow editors, the poets Ron Padgett and Dick Gallup, on their forays ...”

“... his first book of art history, Form and Meaning: Writings on the Renaissance and Modern Art by Robert Klein, which includes an intriguing essay on ‘the eclipse of the work of art’. Soon Bois is obsessed with the transformations in American art glimpsed in the pages of Artforum, and contrives to visit the United States as an exchange student. Though ...”

“... more ‘restaurant-style’ options (often devised by celebrity chefs). What they can’t do is alter the basic quality of the food, because the market provides them with very few alternatives – this is the food that allows the hospital to remain within budget while making money for the suppliers. School food and hospital food have got worse since their ...”

“... own son, John, who also became an adept fiddler, like his grandfather. Clare felt an affinity with Robert Burns, collected songs as Burns did, and during his asylum years wrote a number of songs in the Scottish vernacular. Clare says in his autobiography that both his parents were ‘illiterate to the last degree’. Concerned to dispel the myths, Bate points ...”

“... No dice: six months later de Gaulle reissued his fin de non recevoir. It would take two events to alter the situation. In the summer of 1969, de Gaulle was succeeded by his prime minister, Georges Pompidou, who had played no role in the Resistance and made a postwar career in Rothschilds before rising through the ranks of the Gaullist administration. A year ...”

“... comes very close to repeating the error of Mandeville, who did not see that printing money would alter its scarcity-value (though the case is modified by the latent, perfectly reasonable thought, ‘If we could get some of this stuff out of the country, just think what it could do!’). Something very similar is going on in the notorious passage about gold ...”

“... is by the psychiatrist Peter Ostwald, the author of interesting psycho-biographies of Nijinsky and Robert Schumann; a good amateur violinist, and a friend of the pianist, Ostwald died of cancer before his book was published, but was apparently able to finish his manuscript despite the travails of his final weeks. Ostwald’s is the first study that tries not ...”

“... career. The two concepts serve in different ways to assert a high standard of social democracy. Robert Anderson’s Education and Opportunity in Victorian Scotland does not destroy these beliefs, but he shows that the latter one was true only in a very limited state, and that many people were determined to keep it limited. The 19th-century middle class was ...”

“... above the passions of faction’; mature people ‘accepted society as it was and didn’t seek to alter it’ (in a spirit of Christian or Eliot-like resignation); mature judgment was ‘objective’ or ‘impersonal’ – that is, uncompromised by passion or ideology. Which put the young of the Fifties at a disadvantage, especially as they were so small a ...”

“... It comes from encountering speech as an impenetrable wall – except it isn’t really, as Robert Frost knew. (He used the metaphor of people speaking through a wall, where you can discern the tone but not the words, in his ars poetica ‘The Sound of Sense’.)One could extract an entire book on Proust from Essays Two. When she agreed to translate Du ...”

“... the camera), and because it showed to the full Karel Reisz’s sympathy for people who, in Robert Musil’s words, go out on an adventure and lose their way. This was a key element in all his films, whether they were set in Nottingham, London or Las Vegas. I think especially of the confused and manic Morgan in the film of that name, and of the driven ...”