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“... and the Civil War. Their agenda was nationalist rather than social or economic. On St Patrick’s Day 1943 de Valera broadcast a version of his dream for Ireland: ‘a land whose countryside would be bright with cosy homesteads, whose fields and villages would be joyous with the sounds of industry, with the romping of sturdy children, the contests of athletic ...”

“... which collapsed in the early Nineties, while Scargill continued to hang on – as he does to this day – to the presidency of a union which is now in toto less than half the size of the Yorkshire area he inherited in 1973. This support never went without saying. Other figures, less flamboyant though undoubtedly more loyal, could rely on the Party for more ...”

“... outbursts of unmotivated violence. Occasionally his characters simply die out of the blue: ‘One day Orlov stuffed himself with mashed peas and died. Krylov, having heard the news, also died. And Spiridonov died regardless. And Spiridonov’s wife fell from the cupboard and also died. And the Spiridonov children drowned in a pond.’ ‘Characters’ is ...”

“... an entirely reasonable feeling that there must be more to political life than perpetual defeat. Neil Kinnock and John Smith felt this as strongly as their successors, but their successors went a lot further. In a famous essay published nearly ninety years ago, Max Weber suggested that politics was becoming the territory of the professional: politics was the ...”

“... with Mandela. There are politicians whose ability to be neutral is even more suspect – Neil Kinnock heads a Labour Party team, for example; rock stars come to clean up on the South African circuit so long off-limits to them; endless self-appointed ‘monitoring’ teams from black American universities; old South African exiles like the actor ...”

“... one, as his earlier Devolving English Literature implies, more firmly focused on a latter-day drama in which the last act of the dismantling of Empire is played out in terms of the breakup of the United Kingdom. Appropriately, the main proposition, reiterated through a number of carefully linked, not to say insistent and repetitive essays, is starkly ...”

“... patently absurd, it is impossible to understand the attitude of some of those involved – such as Neil Kinnock – without appreciating that a weaker version of the argument does have a certain intuitive appeal. The case for going on subsidising uneconomic pits rests on two propositions. First, production of North Sea oil will peak next year or very soon ...”

“... crowed over: You overreached yourself, Patroclus.   Yes, my darling, Not only God was out that day but Lord Apollo. ‘You know Apollo loves the Trojans ... ’ The point is emphasised on the next page with enlarged typography and later by a double page with APOLLO’S name Pounding across it in huge block capitals, like Chinese characters in The ...”

“... and physically (he got into a number of fist fights at Oxford). He also had what another brother, Neil, described as ‘intense superficial sentimentality’, allowing himself to be overcome by gusts of skin-deep emotion. He was clearly encouraged by the notion that Churchill (whom he knew well) had a personality somewhat similar to his own. It was a fatal ...”

“... the not very saintly Saint Olaf. We hear nothing of them from the British Museum, and in the book Neil Price has only two pages on ‘The Way of the Warrior’, one of them devoted to challenging ‘the idea that “proper” Vikings were necessarily male’. It’s true that the literary evidence provides examples of female heroism, and of noble female ...”

“... The next year produced both Carter’s film The Company of Wolves, a horror story directed by Neil Jordan, in which the heroine turns into a wolf, and Nights at the Circus, whose winged protagonist is, as Carter emphasises, ‘a big girl’. Her misjudged but reiterated contempt for Penelope Fitzgerald, who won the Booker Prize in 1979, was perhaps of a ...”

“... parents were just undemonstrative as I remember nothing comparable to the pride of the parents of Neil Kinnock, for instance, when he passed the 11+ (and so wouldn’t have to go down the mine). I can’t even remember taking the exam except that my friend (and alphabetical neighbour on the school register) Albert Benson passed it with me but was too poor to ...”

“... The explosive potential of The State and Revolution can’t be overestimated: in its pages, as Neil Harding wrote in Leninism (1996), ‘the vocabulary and grammar of the Western tradition of politics was abruptly dispensed with.’ What followed can be called, borrowing the title of Althusser’s text on Machiavelli, la solitude de Lenine: a time when he ...”

“... going to be a case of ‘ghastly thro’ the drizzling rain,/On the bald street breaks the blank day.’ What was surprising, then, was that some Leavers too were a little fractious. Even before Big Ben had failed, as it turned out, to bong in celebration of the UK’s deliverance (Northern Ireland only sort of), there were spots of disillusion already ...”

“... a community and the failings of a welfare state. Venables and Thompson re-enacted something that day: they played out a fantasy of watching and being watched. Much of what they did – ‘let’s steal a kid,’ Thompson said – was based on a fantasy drawn from a home video they’d seen together, Child’s Play 3, a story about a psychotic killer-doll ...”