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“... the dreadful rhyming and dovetailing of his scene’s paths and branches – connects with nothing vital in the motif. Put the darn trees up on the hill, say I. Let them lord it unashamedly, melodramatically, as they do in The Moon’s Last Phase. Flood the foreground with English gloom, if that’s what you’re trying for. Cancel the ambiguous ...”

“... was a disaster. Only a few pupils ever turned up, among them the future theatrical superstar David Garrick, one of whose earliest comic turns was to impersonate Johnson’s ‘tumultuous and awkward fondness’ for his wife, ‘running round the bed after she had lain down, and crying “I’m coming, my Tetsie, I’m coming, my Tetsie!”’ Boswell ...”

“... liberal internationalism’ have come from an older cadre of conservatives. John Mearsheimer and David Hendrickson are both outcasts from the American right, both teach political science in the Midwest and both have opposed every US military intervention since the end of the Cold War. They believe that the US ought to have emerged from it as a chastened ...”

“... has a telos: the fulfilment of the prophecy that the Messiah would be a descendant of the House of David. This precludes the pyrotechnic genealogical loops of the pagan gods, but it also illustrates the problem of genealogy more generally. Where to start and who to include? The Gospel of Luke takes the lineal patriarchal story back to Adam, which makes us all ...”

“... culture. A still more obvious place to look for solid fare is the source book assembled by David Burnley in The History of the English Language. This is, in effect, an anthology of English written between the ninth century and the early 20th. The passages are well chosen both as representative samples of their time and as having inherent ...”

“... of Schiller’s Mannheim. In music as in the other arts his ‘questionable’ taste was a vital part of his own questioning of ‘taste’ and the hierarchies it stood for: but it was equally a part of his quest for the Utopian spirit in whatever guise it might appear. There was no condescension about his tributes to those forms of popular art and ...”

“... she said five words that chilled Joan to the bone: ‘What difference does it make?’ This is vital, as constant as the river and as terminal as the sentences, for it gets at the last worry, the greatest, that in all the wagons west and pioneering, in all the strenuous self-dramatisation of being American, maybe nothing matters, maybe there is no ...”

“... which he rightly saw as the precondition of great social transformations. Much earlier, another vital bit of modernity had been produced in the same country, in Gutenberg’s workshop in Mainz. As Benedict Anderson has pointed out, print was the precondition of all modern ‘imagined communities’. Now it would give rise to the most widely-read book of the ...”

“... powers of Ernest Bevin (‘his crowning achievement’, in the words of the new foreign secretary, David Lammy). Apps describes Bevin as ‘the man who would strike the initial spark that started Nato’ and who took the ‘first faltering steps’ towards its creation. But however long you pick over Bevin’s correspondence with George Marshall and Arthur ...”

“... of Citizen Kane. Welles’s own ‘presence in the picture’, Otis Ferguson wrote, ‘is always a vital thing, an object of fascination to the beholder. In fact, without him the picture would have fallen into all its various component pieces of effect, allusion and display. He is the big part and no one will say he is not worth it.’ The charm is made ...”

“... You​ ought to be in a kindergarten,’ a Canadian nurse exclaimed to David Jones, aged twenty, awaiting transfer home in July 1916 after being wounded in Mametz Wood. Even a decade later, photographs show a wary child or an understudy for an adult. Prudence Pelham, the staunchest of his extended female fellowship, described him as ‘completely unsexed ...”

“... but as heroic underdogs. They were shown on television being shot and beaten by Israeli soldiers. David the good guy was now a Palestinian, and nasty Goliath an Israeli. The women and the old joined in to support the uprising, and all were soon aware that the use of stones rather than guns was their strongest political card in the ...”

“... were either soured by authorial complaints against Olwyn Hughes, Ted Hughes and the Estate (e.g. David Holbrook, Edward Butscher) or have come to nothing (e.g. Lois Ames, Harriet Rosenstein). Most of the book-length literary criticism is unimpressive. There isn’t much to choose, for example, between Margaret Dickie Uroff (‘As they developed, Plath came ...”

“... from cryptographic quality-checker to admired chef de codage of a vastly expanded, efficient and vital SOE unit which by the end of the war had handled some forty million messages from agents in the field. Between Silk and Cyanide is his account (or as much of it as was allowed by the Official Secrete Act) of how he did it, of how, with him leading from ...”

“... dividing idiocies and employ our energies directly, as best we can, on the actual material of the vital inheritance that unites us and divides us.’ The Gaelic poet he commemorates is Padraigin Haicead (1600-1654), and he provides a translation of a tribute from Haicead to a harper which might serve as an epigraph for the whole volume: Blessings on your ...”