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“... David Keenan’s​ first novel, This Is Memorial Device: An Hallucinated Oral History of the Post-Punk Scene in Airdrie, Coatbridge and Environs 1978-86 (2017), documents the rise and fall of a fictitious (though awesomely real) band called Memorial Device. Its members are from Keenan’s home town of Airdrie – about thirteen miles east of Glasgow – and the book takes the form of 26 testimonies from band members, friends, jilted lovers, relatives, hangers-on and rival acts ...”

“... even North America, protect him from the charge of parochialism. Even so, one is left wishing that means could be found to take him round on circuit, so that more of England at least could be brought under his penetrating gaze. One area he is evidently unfamiliar with is the western edge of the Weald, that very distinctive belt of abruptly precipitous ...”

“... the emotional connection is so obvious that it scarcely needs pointing out: to him, being British means, among other things, not being European. Less obviously, his attitudes to England, English literature and English history also help to explain his otherwise baffling inability to understand his opponents on the opposite side of the argument. For the ...”

“... and Dalton differed furiously, and at the end of the decade irreconcilably, but they differed over means, not over ends. Their most violent quarrels had to do with foreign and defence policy, not with the pace or direction of socialisation at home. Even their dispute over emergency powers concerned the methods by which a future Labour government would achieve ...”

“... that tragedy does indeed occur in the lives of ordinary people, that modern life is by no means devoid of exemplary suffering and death, and that the real tragedy of tragedy is that it could often have been avoided. Eagleton endorses all these arguments and directs them at a generation he regards as either besotted with a belief in self-fashioning, a ...”

“... premises to a firm controlled by Green’s wife, from which they were then leased back. By this means, the firm’s owners got hard cash in the present by loading the firm with obligations in the future – to fund pensions, to maintain its premises and to repay its creditors. To cover these liabilities, of course, the firm had to maintain itself as a going ...”

“... nouvelles à la main. The absolute monarchy became increasingly tolerant of these and other means of bypassing official censorship, using it to gauge public feelings or manipulate them – at its peril, Darnton’s account implies. These​ days we know very well that more news doesn’t always result in more truthful information. The ideas and emotions ...”

“... the teaching burden of thirty to forty hours a week which he had hitherto endured. But he was, David Boucher tells us, as intellectually isolated within his own university as he was from the broader philosophical currents represented by Russell. His chief influences came from quite elsewhere – notably, from the Italian idealists, Croce, Gentile and de ...”

“... later to serve as one of London’s first cinemas). Other French paintings, including a version of David’s Coronation of Napoleon, with its dazzling profusion of documentary details, were shown separately in London in the same period. By the mid-century touring exhibitions were taking some popular English pictures such as John Martin’s Great Day of his ...”

“... When Elizabeth David’s A Book of Mediterranean Food appeared in 1950, many of the ingredients it called for were unobtainable. But even after meat came off the ration, few people can have had much practical need for a traditional Turkish recipe for stuffing a whole sheep. That was not the point. Saturated with description, of figs and aubergines, of fishing boats at anchor in Marseille and paella pans left out to dry in Spanish courtyards, Mediterranean Food brought a beakerful of the warm South to chilly, postwar England ...”

“... other two novelists under review are more blatant in this respect, since both Michèle Roberts and David Grossman have written novels which pivot on the sentimental privileging of authorship. ‘I want to tell you my stories. I want to record my life with you. I want to give myself a history,’ insists one of Roberts’s narrators, a contemporary writer ...”

“... The nostalgia of Christine Brooke-Rose is, surprisingly, for a golden age of character in fiction; David Caute harks back to the Sixties and the heyday of radical hopes; John Fuller conjures a world in which stories can still enchant. But these novelists are all, in their respective ways, nervous about the power of fiction to enthrall, and they live on the ...”

“... it looks as if the electorate has abandoned them too – hence his dumping of the Tories in 1997. David McKnight sees all this differently. Murdoch knew that he could have no influence in China. There was no point in alienating its government and damaging his profits, so he ditched the promotion of democracy and with it the BBC and Patten. In 1997, Murdoch ...”

“... were unquestionably enhanced as authors by their criminality. However, this is not essential: Mr David Stockman, President Reagan’s first Director of the Office of Management and Budget, the OMB, has been offered a million or so for the rendering of his tenure in public office. This latter involved no known larceny or perversion of law: Mr Stockman gained ...”

“... writer? Not me, at any rate. The Garden of Eden is studded with provincial delicacies Elizabeth David would be proud of (‘jamon serrano, a smoky, hard-cured ham from pigs that fed on acorns’) and dramatic narratives of eating and drinking that might please M.F.K. Fisher. The book is a sort of domestic novel, a portrait of amour fou and its aftermath in ...”