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“... of a century of cults and gurus, of sincerity and fraudulence, of hopes and disappointments, Peter Washington detects the faint sound of Blavatsky’s baboon having the last laugh. Washington presents his subject as the rise of the Western guru: in fact, charisma, faith, leader and follower, have never been absent from religion or from history. In the ...”

“... partygoers who found their fellow guests talking about Nietzsche. ‘Elbert Hubbard did all your reading for you,’ the publishers said. ‘His book will make you so well informed – you’ll never need to feel embarrassed or uncomfortable in company again.’ Of late, the uneducated, and even the educated, have been well served, for the familiar thick ...”

“... new wave of Hungarian refugees arrives, among them the brilliant, hungry, ambitious young scholar Peter, who’ll become briefly Lili’s lover, Anna’s homework coach and Sándor’s interpreter to the West. It’s to Peter, himself an elderly and distinguished intellectual these days, that Anna imagines addressing the ...”

“... of running illegals, moles and other agents. In fact, the KGB probably spends more of its time reading the newspapers. Much of the intelligence which can be obtained only by covert means in the East is freely available through open sources in the West. A KGB officer in Washington might begin an average day by ...”

“... also irreproachable standards as an academic historian, and these made his Disraeli disconcerting reading for the more impressionable members of Blake’s own party. He may have been expected to act as the keeper of the bones of the saint. Instead, he revealed where the bodies were buried. Iconoclasm of this sort was unanswerable. It was worse than ...”

“... Its applications to the study of history have been essentially local and detailed – a way of reading texts, a rogue arrow in the hermeneutic quiver. The reactions against history which really confront us are the fruits of our own, indigenous Rankeanism – the various strains of historical thought grouped under the Post-Modernist label are primarily ...”

“... some cities and towns would inevitably be blown away, then doubtless more, then perhaps all. In reading Thomas’s account of the acute (i.e. direct, proximal) effects of the Hiroshima bomb we must keep it in mind that by modern standards this was a pipsqueak affair – a ‘technological antique’ like a Tiffany lamp. With a modern thermonuclear bomb ...”

“... discussing Wesleyan symbolism and psychology. In tone, they are somewhere between a chorus and a reading group: ‘He’s high-minded and he’s unpredictable, and most important of all: he’s a troublemaker, and troublemakers value their privacy. So he resents our eyes. We irritate him. In point of fact,’ Doc grinned widely, ‘he loathes the ...”

“... himself is there to tell us, in his author’s preface, what we can expect as a dividend from our reading: some of his favourite recipes (not to be taken literally), a passing glance at one or two of his favourite pictures, and a vicarious stay at one of his most cherished hotels – the Grand Hotel Oloffson in Port au Prince, Haiti. Since he has been so ...”

“... clear and freshen the air. Beside Raymond Carver’s posthumous collection, the others I have been reading seem musty, costumed, made-up. Anyone who finds his poems flat or prosaic might consider Edward Thomas’s defence of Robert Frost: ‘if his work were printed [as prose] it would have little in common with the kind of prose that runs to blank verse ...”

“... of my life’ – for ‘it would be necessary to read an infinity of novels.’ Such a wholesale reading of fiction takes on for many of us, as for Trollope, ‘a terrible aspect’. It doesn’t apparently, though, for Gilbert Phelps, John Sutherland and Peter Keating, surveyors and encyclopedists of the form who in their ...”

“... voice. Simpson practises what he commends in earlier critics as ‘exemplary standards of close reading’, not only of the poetry but of relevant historical documentation. He has a fascinating and meticulous chapter on the economy of the Lake District in the late 18th century, which manages (as close reading alone ...”

“... which we try to ameliorate its effects, is what still makes The Road to Wigan Pier uncomfortable reading for optimists, despite the fact that many of the economic horrors he described have gone. Part of Bainbridge’s problem with the present is the past: All my parents’ bright days had ended before I was born. They faced backwards. In so doing they ...”

“... as well as Christian, despised them (the Emperor Julian would carefully exclude them from his reading-list for embattled eggheads). It was a genre without a name, a novelty and therefore a nonentity in an age of strict Classicism. We have the names of some novelists, but without details and without dates: modern conjecture has to supply the historical ...”

“... example, that its first editions should be rushed to Number 10 for the Prime Minister’s bedtime reading. When it was said of him that he was really ‘a news editor manqué’, it was meant fondly. Later, these traits were incorporated into the indictment of him as a man of inveterately short-view and opportunistic or tactical preoccupation. His remark ...”