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“... as too preoccupied with class and economic inequality. He also wanted to devolve economic power by means of industrial democracy and workers’ control, on a model pioneered in 1976 by the Lucas Aerospace Shop Stewards Combine Committee, which had formed to contest job cuts but ended by developing its own corporate plan for Lucas Aerospace focused on making ...”

“... And he has produced a book which makes a moral claim of enormous importance today. Memory is a means of making loss survivable, and thus of allowing the past to have closure. More specifically, this is an attempt at ‘a new reference work in the domain of memory and feeling’, ‘a full memorial book to the Jewish children deported from France’. Born ...”

“... do like reading other women, and seeing them properly recognised for their work.But it’s also, David Runciman reckons on his Talking Politics podcast, to do with the eventfulness of Arendt’s life, which is why Ken Krimstein’s comic-book biography of 2018 is structured around our heroine’s ‘Three Escapes’. Arendt did not arrive in the US until ...”

“... making up pointless jobs just for the sake of keeping us all working’ – from an article by David Graeber for Strike! magazine about ‘bullshit jobs’. Productive jobs, he argues, have been automated away and replaced by administrative ones which masquerade as service: HR, PR, financial services, ancillary industries like dog-washing and all-night ...”

“... you know’ really does seem to mean ‘write what you know,’ but ‘find your voice’ actually means ‘find someone else’s voice’: thus Styron ‘found his voice’ in Nat Turner, reimagining ‘authorship as a kind of ventriloquism … which is an offence against the rule of writing what you know’.McGurl never quite articulates the law that ...”

“... palace coup in Oman in 1970 and – last but not least – three abortive plots, farmed out to David Stirling and sundry other mercenaries under the initially benevolent eye of Western intelligence services, to overthrow the Gaddafi regime between 1971 and 1973 in an episode known as the Hilton Assignment. At the same time, the story of Libya in 2011 gives ...”

“... tapering sides marked with corrugated rings, like a rocket engine scratched from the final cut of David Lynch’s Dune. The concert was at the top, and in order to get to it I passed through an exhibition of art created since the invasion, Ty Yak? How Are You? One of the curators, the artist Katya Libkind, had left a comment on the walls: ‘Basically it’s ...”

“... matters stood, the Congress high command took the view that ‘the independence of Bengal really means in present circumstances the dominance of the Moslem League in Bengal,’ and the party rallied behind the Mahasabha, with joint meetings whipping up Hindu demands for Bengal’s partition, Gandhi in support. When the question was put to the Bengal ...”

“... letters, packed with insight and wonderful phrases, are quoted in Brett Millier’s biography, in David Kalstone’s Becoming a Poet and in Lorrie Goldensohn’s Elizabeth Bishop: The Biography of a Poetry. ‘What one seems to want in art, in experiencing it, is the same thing that is necessary for its creation, a self-forgetful, perfectly useless ...”

“... teenage boys, meanwhile, knew it wouldn’t be long before they were married off, occasionally by means of adverts their parents had placed in the matrimonial columns of the ethnic press. ‘Respectable family seeking suitable match for their son: sincere, clean-shaven, fair, chemical engineering MSc, enjoys his fitness routines and believes in high moral ...”

“... then on to Malawi and Zimbabwe, in November 1991, will underestimate the hardiness and courage of David Livingstone, who traversed, on foot, thousands of miles of bush, mountain and swamp, fearsome to behold even from the air. But Livingstone’s country had not been unknown to the Portuguese, established on both east and west coast for centuries. The term ...”

“... parties remains activated in the present stand-off. Economic tensions, carefully explained by David Styan in Unfinished Business, have continued to simmer, while old ideological grievances between the Tigrayan and Eritrean movements, exacerbated by the TPLF’s constitution for a post-Cold War Ethiopia, have given way to something like hatred. One of the ...”

“... ate with M.F.K. Fisher and Julia Child. And when she settled in England in the 1960s, Elizabeth David told her that the bit in her first novel about a dinner of sea urchins, ‘heaped in a great armorial pile … like the unexplained detail on the hill by the thistles and the hermitage of a quattrocento background’, followed by a plain grilled loup and no ...”

“... title of a first short-story collection is always ‘Stories for ME You Doubting Fucks!’ which means there is a quality to them that is missing from subsequent books. In CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, which appeared in 1996, this quality is so forceful that it strides across the landscape as an actual figure. The setting is the Chicago of Saunders’s ...”

“... Ghanaians, Communist Party etc.’ There wasn’t much truth in these claims. ‘At its height,’ David Gibbs writes in The Political Economy of Third World Intervention (1991), ‘the communist intervention in the Congo comprised no more than 380 Soviets and Czechoslovaks – against 14,000 UN troops and many thousands of Belgian military ...”