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“... teams from black American universities; old South African exiles like the actor Anthony Sher, the ex-clergyman Cosmas Desmond – now the only white man on the PAC list – and Ronald Segal, once editor of the Penguin Africa Library, now bitterly inveighing against the Coloureds for their refusal to vote for the ANC. Such people – I’m ...”

“... in all the intervening time. No, she insisted, it was not true that Stolypin made the sign of the Cross when the Tsar appeared at the edge of his box. ‘I was watching him intently, and what Stolypin did, although badly wounded in the stomach, was to raise his left arm and twice wave to the Tsar to go back into the box and keep out of sight.’ A sensible ...”

“... tome after tome on the subject of her untimely death. Come on down, the Murder Cover-up Theorists. Anthony Summers wrote Goddess, an exhaustive, exhausting and paranoid account of how everyone in the known world wanted Marilyn dead. He also did the actress the supreme disservice of publishing a picture of her on the slab. There have been many of these ...”

“... are unfinished, of course. The author gives up or steps away into death. Other long projects, like Anthony Powell’s Dance to the Music of Time, are finished to the slight surprise of their author, who perhaps never entirely believed he would get there and have some life to spare. Even completed works of this scope carry a suggestion of fragility within their ...”

“... the pub until it closed. The man with the greatest incentive to call ‘time’, his heir-apparent Anthony Eden, lacked the nerve and nastiness to do so. On numerous occasions Churchill toughed it out with his frustrated deputy, conning Eden into handling most of the Parliamentary business while he maintained titular leadership of the Party (and got on with ...”

“... nationalism ‘springs, inevitably, from the requirements of a modern economy’. Critics such as Anthony Smith (once Gellner’s student) have argued that this determinedly modernist account underplays the role both of actual historic continuities and of the emotions that make nationalism more than a set of bureaucratic edicts. Or as Anderson puts ...”

“... he is known to have offered the ‘Roman murder story’ to a number of his friends (including Anthony Trollope and Tennyson) and the idea that he himself might make something of it seems to have come to him only after Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s death in 1861 and his return to England later the same year. The poem, whose roots go back to Browning’s ...”

“... and reluctant reply from a steward (I never met this man, but his prose style suggested tight cross-gartering). His Lordship was away indefinitely: the house was shut up and empty: my request could not be entertained. I did go to Wimborne St Giles one day while I was revising the doctorate as a book, just to double-check whether there was a visible ...”

“... historical characters got a tick if they were on the side of liberty (Cromwell, Chatham), a cross (Charles I, James II) if they held up the march of progress. Because he went in for active royalty and made some attempt to govern on his own account rather than leaving it to the Whig aristocracy, George III had been written up as a villain and a clumsy ...”

“... identity is characterised not by imperial nostalgia, as such commentators as Fintan O’Toole and Anthony Barnett have suggested, but by a more inchoate sense of communal ‘loss’. Loss of what? ‘One part of the Englishman’s burden of the three Celtic statelets was to eschew a patriotism that was other than British, or a flag that was other than the ...”

“... Mills, Pine and Gilmore, Thomas Frank), and even a few socio-economic ones (Ulrich Beck, Anthony Giddens). The point is, however, not necessarily to endorse these (many are standard culture critiques), but rather to indicate the direction in which literary theory opens onto other disciplines. Class analysis is meanwhile omnipresent, and plagued as ...”

“... physical urges are hard to combat,’ he says. That much is nothing new: Jesus and St Anthony knew it very well. But Atkins’s conclusion is staunchly democratic: ‘Fighting the scale armed only with willpower and determination works, at best, for only five low-fat dieters out of a hundred.’ If, however, we use the best nutritional science, we ...”

“... theory were already creating a self-contained alternative political thought space conducive to the cross-fertilisation of conspiracist ideas. Covid-19 and government efforts to control it – an extreme event, accompanied by what can seem baffling and intrusive restrictions – appear, in the conspiracist mind, as the most open moves yet by a secret group of ...”

“... and Mr Johnson has them ‘crossing into Lebanon’. In the same way, no doubt, did the Russians cross into Afghanistan and the Germans enter Poland. The little matter of the entry into Lebanon costing some twenty-five thousand lives is discreetly omitted. In 1982 Israel’s indiscriminate bombardment of Beirut caused heavy civilian casualties. Yet for an ...”

“... Penelope Mortimer arrived to interview him for the Observer magazine in 1978, she could barely cross the threshold. Dunsmuir calmly explained that ‘the front door had been off its hinges for some time and it was difficult to get things fixed.’ Graham’s living conditions were a satire on the whole idea of having a home or feeling at home: when the ...”