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“... role in Bridge on the Fucking River Kwai the penny drops. Trapped in his own Japanese prisoner-of-war camp for ten years, he’s lied and cursed his way free. ‘I won’t be coming in on Monday’, he tells me confidentially. ‘I’m going to the fucking races.’ Of course he is. I may be there myself. Diality The shock of remembering, having forgotten for ...”

“... Afew​ months after the end of the Second World War, Stephen Spender returned to Germany. His plan was to contact German intellectuals. This was not very fruitful: most were dead or in exile, and Ernst Jünger, whom he did meet, evaded his invitation to show unqualified guilt for the Nazi past. But then Spender was asked to reopen libraries in the British zone of occupation, having first purged them of their Nazi staff and Nazi literature ...”

“... tickets.’ But he had never penetrated the haute bourgeoisie. ‘His delineations of middle-class life have in consequence a harshness and meanness which do not belong to that life in reality.’ The Dedlocks and the Veneerings and Sir Mulberry Hawk are simply not like the people one meets. By the same token, Dickens’s pictures of our higher ...”

“... In South Africa, a highly capitalised economy, mainstream opposition to apartheid took the form of class struggle, not race war, and Kentridge is fascinated both by the failures of the Russian Revolution and the successes of revolutionary avant-gardism. A dazzling multi-channel video collaboration with Miller and Meyburgh ...”

“... the screenplay for Spartacus; President Kennedy crossed the thinning picket lines of Catholic War Veterans to watch the film in a cinema in Washington DC. The blacklist, at least in principle, was broken. So Trumbo entered Hollywood legend as ‘The Man who Broke the Blacklist’. As Pauline Kael put it, he became ‘the leading exponent of the ...”

“... The incredible frequency of these strikes proves best of all the extent to which the social war has broken out all over England. No week passes, scarcely a day, indeed, in which there is not a strike in some direction, now against a reduction, then against a refusal to raise the rate of wages ... sometimes against new machinery, or for a hundred other reasons ...”

“... their traducers – the Establishment in general and the Court in particular. Throughout the war, Bloch argues, Windsor only desired to serve his country: this was a magnanimous gesture made with all the sincerity of a loyal and royal citizen. But, he suggests, at a time when all men of talent and good will should have pulled together, and when the great ...”

“... journalism. He had known controversy before. His dispatches for the Times during the Spanish Civil War were mutilated by his editors, pilloried by his critics and celebrated by such admirers as Ernest Hemingway: ‘When the fakers are all dead they will read Matthews in the schools to find out what really happened,’ Hemingway announced in 1938. But nothing ...”

“... by which the world’s contents are classified have not been completely established for the class of things that compose the collection, the arrangement of the things can represent an understanding of the world that is not yet conventional.’ That, you might say, is perfectly lucid, but you might say that only after you have read the sentence twice. I ...”

“... late 19th centuries in particular. There are many reasons. Cross-dressing draws on the erotics of war and military discipline, making a heady combination of female and military narcissism: there are many loving descriptions of the male uniform in the autobiographical accounts of female soldiers. At the same time, it relies on overt theatricality. It is no ...”

“... to an act of roadside desperation. Driving on the highway in America is like flying economy class: you take your own food or suffer the consequences. Fast food can easily stand for all that is wrong with America, but that is not the way John Jakle, a professor of geography, and Keith Sculle, a professor of history, see it. The trenchantly anti-ironic ...”

“... people’s personal lives. But these images are, I would suggest, largely the creation of middle-class ideology. Mr and Mrs Average do not lie awake worrying because British ‘possessions’ coloured in red are no longer boldly splashed across the map of the world. Nor do most of us feel strangled by restrictions on personal freedom, even if we sometimes ...”

“... for power, ingenuity and subtlety alike. The historic span of Paradise Postponed is that of post-war England, as witnessed chiefly by the family of a fashionable left-wing cleric named Simeon Simcox. The story looks back from his death in 1985 and, neatly and undemandingly, intertwines events of the past forty-odd years. This family saga side works ...”

“... ridiculous belief in authority, order and parochial patriotism, but also the old left, with its war against capitalism: both fight their shadow-theatre battles in disregard of the new realities. The signifier of this new reality in the liberal communist Newspeak is ‘smart’. Being smart means being dynamic and nomadic, and against centralised ...”

“... through the pages. Others may admire the young man’s assumption that conventional middle-class manners and pleasures are compatible with an uninterrupted dedication to the craft of music. Andrew Motion has said that what he wants from a biography is information about commonplace matters, such as haircuts, so he will approve the young Britten’s ...”