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“... is access, and access to power is often power enough. In his manifesto, Republic, Lost, he quotes Paul Simon, a former senator from Illinois, to explain how it works: If I got to a Chicago hotel at midnight … and there were 20 phone calls waiting for me, 19 of them names I didn’t recognise and the 20th someone I recognised as a $1000 donor to my ...”

“... not be going down to the city?’ the man asked suddenly. He had joined me as I was climbing the hill, and his curiosity had not been satisfied. ‘How long do you stay in Damascus?’ ‘I don’t know. Several months.’ ‘Wullah! What would one do in Damascus for months? What is wrong with New York?’ (A foreigner is always an American ...”

“... sleep with the moon goddess. He is said to have built a bridge to link his palace on the Palatine hill with the major temples on the nearby Capitoline hill, as if to unite secular and religious power in the state. There is also plenty of talk about his ridiculously extravagant lifestyle (from serving food covered in gold ...”

“... Kipling is the same. Ortheris and Mulvaney, like Parnesius the Roman centurion in Puck of Pook’s Hill, speak no language: which is why their casual informed references, their offhand expertise, their sententiousness and sentiment, blend together in ways which so many people of the same sort recognise and even begin internally to adopt. Hemingway learnt from ...”

“... Biblical ideal of the godly bishop. Reminded of this mood later in life, Aylmer replied with St Paul: ‘When I was a child I spoke as a child ...’ Reality had intervened. A balance needed to be struck between Church and State; the clergy had to learn the same political rules as everyone else; and bishops could only hope to resist the Erastian ambitions ...”

“... life, the breakdown of once cash-free practices into severally billable units of account. Capitol Hill lobbying outfits now pay queuing firms to stand in line, sometimes overnight, so that the lobbyists can step in just before a committee session starts; ‘concierge’ medical companies offer queue-jumping treatment to those willing to stump up the ...”

“... with our parents. It’s still there, in the cool brightness of the porch of their house on the hill in Broughty Ferry in the east of Dundee, with logs and potatoes and an old sideboard hand-decorated by my mother. The animal was killed by my great-uncle, Robin Meek, and a local huntsman, Belli, in the Nilgiri hills in southern India in 1931. Originally ...”

“... and ‘the double-dapple’ of Wales its catalyst: an irregular and enclosed landscape, whose hill and river rhythms, like the sea-light of Caldey Island off the Pembrokeshire coast, freed him from the hieratic rigidities of Gill’s aesthetic, its trapped elegance – what Jones later called its ‘toyishness’ – and rigid closure to contingency. One ...”

“... my agent, calls to say I have been offered a role in the BBC Andrew Davies adaptation of Fanny Hill. She reads through this raunchy script finding no mention of the part for which I’m slated until she gets to the very final scene, where Fanny meets an old and respectable gentleman (me) whom she fucks to extinction, then inherits his fortune and lives ...”

“... An ow tha’s got to leather em To stop em gi’in t’nod. An some o t’same in Bible Where Paul screams fit to bust Ow men are fallen creatures But womenfolk are t’wust. Now I reckon this fired Peter, An men-talk were is goad, An culprit were our belderin God An is ancient, bullyin road. No, Pete weren’t drove by vengeance, Rountwistedness or ...”

“... misogyny. No matter where you look, then or now, here, there and everywhere, up ethnographic hill, down historical dale, men disparage women. In his trawl of anthropological data, historical records, literature and letters, art and music, David Gilmore finds that men have always and everywhere expressed fear, disgust and hatred of women. From the ...”

“... to Rowland, is ‘again the setting’ in another lunette, in which Saint Anthony meets Saint Paul the Hermit, but the background here is the desert, not Alexandria, and it isn’t even a very Egyptian-looking desert. The other lunettes do not detain Rowland, although it is likely that Saint Elizabeth, Saint Sebastian, Saint Barbara and so on meant as ...”

“... of translations of Giono into English recently; along with the ones under review here, we have had Hill (NYRB, 2016), Melville (NYRB, 2017) and Occupation Journal (Archipelago, 2020). I’m not sure what this means, but I hope it suggests a new attention to a once famous writer, and all of the books are well worth a first read or a return. The Open Road and ...”

“... The last word of the novel recalls Conrad. The Heart of Darkness is, however, a risky model. As Paul Theroux’s The Mosquito Coast and Coppola’s Apocalypse Now suggest, its invoked presence can leach the life out of any presumptuous rewriting, converting it into so much anaemic homage. Graham Greene tells us that in his apprentice days he found The Heart ...”

“... a dizzying but pleasurable succession of meetings with his circle of intimates – Walter Berry, Paul Bourget, Abbé Mugnier, Ralph and Lisa Curtis, Madame de Cossé-Brissac, Rosa Fitz-James (“the best hostess I have ever known”), and Philomène de Lévis-Mirepoix – all members of the fashionable upper crust of cosmopolitan Paris.’ Was there no one ...”