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“... Ada Kennard, a dancer in a three-women act that toured the music halls. His father was a Bob: Robert Moffat Livingstone, at different times a seafarer, a window cleaner and a stagehand. According to their son, the couple hadn’t wanted children. Then one night in September 1944, Bob ran out of condoms. The memoirist writes of his conception, ‘With ...”

“... as the mark of an inexperienced and artless ruling class. Even an avowed originalist like Robert Bork, unsuccessfully nominated by Reagan to the Supreme Court in 1987, concedes that ‘self-confident legal institutions do not require so much talking about.’ But Scalia and Bork forged their ideas in battle against a liberal jurisprudence that was ...”

“... Gravil writes very well in his essay here about the curious tenacity of this ‘Robespierrean alter ego’ in Wordsworth’s self-portrait – a lingering sense of the terrible excitement that might attend what Auden called ‘the necessary murder’. Back in England, which was by now at war with the French Republic, he felt an alien in his own ...”

“... Sontag cited were so powerfully composed that they attained iconic status almost instantly: Robert Capa’s photograph from 1936 of a Spanish Republican fighter, arms flung out as a bullet hits him (that the photo may have been staged doesn’t alter its influence); or the image, taken in Vietnam in 1972 by the AP ...”

“... his cover: ‘There’d been so much killing, one more wasn’t news.’ And Hughes gives him an alter ego in the form of an old wartime pal: Brub Nicolai, a fellow ex-soldier who has become a policeman with the LAPD. If Dix’s mind is the book’s subject, his mind games take up a large part of it. Brub is hunting down the killer, who he doesn’t realise ...”

“... took her on his knee and told her the story of The Happy Prince. The prince became a sentimental alter ego: when the 12-year-old Natalie had her portrait painted in 1888, she insisted on representing him. Though Barney never saw Wilde again, the psychic link she felt with him was lifelong and profound. Her subsequent crusade on behalf of homosexual love was ...”

“... Robert Lowell wrote the poem ‘Water’ about being on the coast of Maine in the summer of 1948 with Elizabeth Bishop; he put it first in his collection For the Union Dead, which he published in 1964. He sent Bishop a draft of the poem in March 1962, explaining that it was ‘more romantic and grey than the whole truth, for all has been sunny between us ...”

“... Oppen switched from building to cabinet-making. His quiet life and his Purple Heart did not alter the fact that he had been a Communist; or that before the war he and Mary had been charged with ‘felonious assault’ when police broke up a sit-in at a Brooklyn relief bureau; or that after the war Mary Oppen had been involved in the movement to get GIs ...”

“... set up a small intelligence station in Guinea in 1960. Miroslav Adámek (code-named ‘Alter’), an intelligence officer stationed in Conakry, was convinced that Cabral could be a valuable asset and persuaded his superiors to recruit him as a ‘confidential contact’. The Soviets shared Cabral’s critical view of the African socialism of ...”

“... brawling factions in exile, and chronicles the emergence of the increasingly dominant figure of Robert Mugabe. Meredith’s long account of the Kissinger deal, as the result of which Ian Smith became for the first time committed to black majority rule, must be compared carefully with Kissinger’sown forthcoming narrative in the second volume of his ...”

“... of its consequences. But the re-emergence of the state after such a long period of abeyance will alter Tory politics as well. Perhaps the pandemic will complete the abortive shift begun under Theresa May towards a conservatism less enamoured of the free market, hostile to foreigners, but with her peculiarly ascetic authoritarianism replaced with Johnsonian ...”

“... I lack musical intelligence – for which I don’t even have genetics to blame. My older brother, Robert, is a successful pianist. Or, to quote my book Beethoven’s Kiss: Dr Train, the psychoanalyst my father had me see when [my brother] Steve killed himself, once told me, after having determined that my mother hadn’t caused my homosexuality, that the ...”

“... broadly right, even if it is far from the mainstream view among the Anglo-American commentariat. Robert Kagan, for example, remains bullishly confident of America’s supremacy in his new (and ruefully titled) book, The Return of History and the End of Dreams.* He believes that the US should assume ‘leadership of a united democratic bloc’ against the ...”

“... brought Cavafy to a new, wide readership. Hockney had found an exemplar, a kindred spirit and an alter ego through whom, you could say, he re-created himself. His Cavafy – the man’s bespectacled face, his world, his city, his life, his sound, his gestus – constituted a double translation of the poetry, into the portable art of etching via an English ...”

“... except as a version of what television has accustomed us to call ‘fictionalised documentary’. Robert Phelps was able to construct a perfectly coherent autobiography from Colette’s scattered reminiscences, and present The Earthly Paradise as if it were, not an imaginative parallel to her life, but the real thing. All Colette’s biographers, even ...”