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“... had been assassinated. The world was gearing up for the Great War, but Blast was evidence that a major campaign was already underway, and it advertised its confrontational style with a puce-and-black colour scheme and parallel columns of hates and loves, ‘blasted’ and ‘blessed’. The bombastic birth of Vorticism occurs more than 600 pages into Helen ...”

“... admiration for D.H. Lawrence as well as Hitler, Bradford has brought himself up to speed on John Carey’s The Intellectuals and the Masses (1992). Not liking modernism and not wanting to be taken for poncy literary types were Amis-Larkin stances too, and proudly despising Beckett, in particular, is an Amis family tradition. (Kingsley to Larkin in ...”

“... The only public figure to denounce capitalism in the past 25 years, Hobsbawm claims, was Pope John Paul II. All the same, another couple of decades later, the fainthearted witnessed a system so exultant and impregnable that it only just managed to keep the cash machines open on the high streets. Eric Hobsbawm, who was born in the year of the Bolshevik ...”

“... insist that American history is a bit more complicated than that. War, they write, has been the major ‘engine of change’ that ‘defined’ American history and created the American empire. They reject the popular idea that Americans go to war only as a last resort, motivated by self-defence or the desire to preserve and spread freedom rather than ...”

“... always took around with him. (At one point he could eat only Bengers baby foods.) His portrait by John Singer Sargent, which adorns the cover of this volume, makes him look, in the view of Sargent’s biographer, like ‘a business executive’. He attracted neither the adoration nor the hatred that was directed at the more charismatic Curzon and ...”

“... that in no scene would he be required to remove his trousers. Lowe, it turns out, was a sergeant-major in the war, and John Le Mesurier, who played the limp Sergeant Wilson, was a captain. Now Lowe was playing a bank manager who had come up the hard way, and Le Mesurier, his chief clerk, was a pampered ex-public ...”

“... have latched onto the issue. ‘Bioethicists are to ethics what whores are to sex,’ Richard John Neuhaus wrote in the conservative periodical First Things. Dan Callahan, a founder of the Hastings Center, told the New York Times: ‘This is a semi-scandalous situation for my field.’ The Center for Science in the Public Interest issued a press release ...”

“... experiences than ever before. ‘Since Christmas,’ Accidia wrote in 1955, ‘we calculate that John has spoken to over four hundred people – I to about four, and those would be the dustman, fishman, policeman and the woman from one of the Harewood Estate lodges.’ The life of the postwar married woman, diminished and degraded as it was, was whipped up ...”

“... Dana Spiotta’s novel is loosely based on the story of Katherine Ann Power, a Brandeis sociology major who in 1970 helped organise a bank robbery during which a police officer was killed. To begin with, Power ran with another girl, her college room-mate and co-robber, hiding out in women’s communes; after the friend’s arrest, she settled in western ...”

“... of the Heron’; ‘Chivalry and Shame’ and so on. In his conclusion, he praises Edward for five major achievements: the restoration of royal authority after his father’s disastrous reign; the maintenance of domestic peace; the reassertion of England’s power on the international stage; the development of Parliament; and the practice of ‘modernised ...”

“... and a few of the stories in A History of the World are underpowered. But the only other major drawback is Barnes’s self-consciously whimsical humour, which might work in his journalism but often seems ingratiating between even soft covers. He has a particular weakness for jocular circumlocutions, bedecked – because novelists are supposed to be ...”

“... Nero in a very different mode from the Antichrist. The sixth-century historian-cum-fantasist John Malalas gives him the honour of executing Pontius Pilate: ‘Why did he hand the Lord Christ over to the Jews,’ his Nero asks, ‘for he was an innocent man and worked miracles?’ How, Champlin asks, can we account for these discordant versions? Why was ...”

“... enough known that Napoleon’s victory over the Austrian army at Marengo on 14 June 1800 had a major effect on the history of the menu. The surprising haste of the engagement left the French commissariat far behind its commander, whose hunger had to be satisfied with what his cook had to hand: a scrawny chicken butchered with a sabre, some ...”

“... sources and give them life within her fiction is quite exceptional. The Protestant martyrologist John Foxe relates in sketchy detail, with much acknowledgment that his sources are imperfect, the burning of the Lollard Joan Boughton at Smithfield in 1494. ‘The night following that she was burnt,’ Foxe says, ‘the most part of her ashes were had away of ...”

“... of a scruple that finds its red line somewhere between marriage and the marriage bed. (Yes, John Ruskin, but this, we’re given to understand, was Vollman’s second wife.) What’s really odd is Vollman’s need to explain a 19th-century wedding in terms meant to flatter a 21st-century sensibility. When Vollman says: ‘I know what you are ...”