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“... on good terms with friends who could barely stand to be in the same room.’ Ah yes, by all means: to be remote from both sides is a tremendous reinforcement of one’s own rectitude and a tribute in its way to one’s own lonely and yet somehow – yes – brave and upright objectivity. ‘Congratulated himself,’ however: isn’t that slightly to ...”

“... to go through all the paraphernalia of introduction, of ‘getting to know’ one another by means of the normal formalities of social life, seemed hardly worthwhile. We knew one another already; the future was determinate.The lyrical high ends like this: But what – it may reasonably be asked – what about the fact that only a short time before I had ...”

“... government and security officials overseas and in the UK – among them, Assistant Commissioner David Veness, head of Specialist Operations for the Metropolitan Police, the officer in overall operational charge of countering terror in the United Kingdom. Dr Ranstorp is an expert on Hizbollah, and books such as Palestinian Hamas, Defiant Patriot, The Kidnap ...”

“... is no record of such a letter from Maberley in the Post Office archives.’ This means that either Maberley (who on the evidence of the record was well-disposed to the young clerk) sent an unofficial poison-pen letter, or that there was no official ‘character’ of the damning kind Trollope describes. There would of course be no problem if ...”

“... but the books which have been written and inspired by English snobs and sports are by no means all boastful or complicit. The supreme text of recent years is James Fox’s account of Lord Lucan and his set, with their boffes de politesse. There is a touch of Lucanian zombiness in The Monument, and the peer himself takes part in The Passion of John ...”

“... of the diverse Victorian literature of sex, making worthwhile generalisations more feasible. It means that the diversity may overlie a relatively homogeneous sexual culture: in the sense that writers are likely to be more alert to other possibilities of belief and action in their community than they acknowledge (something of this sort is often all that ...”

“... best be understood if one sees the Afrikaners as deliberately using the political instruments as a means of pulling themselves up from the socially and economically-handicapped status of a proletarian nation. Until 1948, the average income of urbanEnglish-speaking whites was well over twice that of Afrikaners. Before the Second World War Afrikaners supplied 20 ...”

“... This is not just a matter of red roses: the Party will need to rethink what (if anything) it means by socialism, and reach a more balanced view about how central it has been within its traditions. This may well entail re-assessing Gaitskell’s attack on Clause 4 after the Party’s defeat in 1959. Morgan dismisses this initiative as ‘a victory for ...”

“... Modernist tradition, let alone return to the clichés of the Academy’s summer show; 4) it means reinventing painting to incorporate the subversive new strategies of Conceptual Art, thus undercutting both the Realist and Modernist traditions, whose epic struggle has now lost its meaning. It doesn’t matter whether Norman Rosenthal was thinking about ...”

“... agreed, among them Saleh Muslim, the leader of the PYD, the YPG’s political arm. In Britain David Richards, the former chief of the defence staff, called on Cameron to accept that Assad’s army was best placed to take the fight to IS. ‘At the moment we’ve got contradictory war aims,’ he told the BBC. ‘We want to deal with Isis but we also want ...”

“... were preventing the private sector taking on public land to build badly needed new homes. In 2010 David Cameron commissioned Philip Green to conduct an ‘efficiency review’ for the new coalition government, and he duly reported that the state, ‘the largest tenant/owner in the country’, was ‘wholly inefficient’ when it came to the use and management ...”

“... of thoughts I not long afterwards wanted to upend, or undermine. In that way, though by different means, prolonged exposure to Stach’s work does have an effect-overlap with prolonged exposure to the work of Kafka. It has been said of Kafka’s work many times that the thing to remember is that it is funny. Kafka was known to laugh uncontrollably when ...”

“... refuser (1853). Perhaps the two portrayals are not coincidental. In 1851, the Melville family read David Copperfield aloud as their evening entertainment. The pre-20th-century office worker saw himself as a cut above the unsalaried labouring masses, and was as ambivalent about his superiors, who were his only means of ...”

“... brother John became the estate surveyor. Brown’s father died when Lancelot was only four, but means had been found to keep him at school until he was 16, possibly with the help of the Loraines, after which he went as an apprentice to the head gardener at Kirkharle. It is one of the ironies of Brown’s peculiar reputation that in his lifetime and since he ...”

“... He didn’t have much use for the work of his contemporaries and juniors (his fellow Celts David Jones and Hugh MacDiarmid were partial exceptions), but was on the whole pleasant about it. A breezy manner (‘Unabashed boys and girls may enjoy them. This book is theirs’), a few eclectic names ...”