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“... senior civil servants who found working with Blair a demoralising experience. Bower quotes Robin Butler, Blair’s first cabinet secretary, saying of his earliest official encounter with the newly elected prime minister: ‘He’s scared of me. He didn’t even ask me how to make the government machine work.’ Bower wants to suggest that this was naivety on ...”

“... were forbidden the use of the carpeted main staircase; Williams’s boss, Humphrey Milford, had a butler who served drinks on a silver salver. His lyrics found an enthusiastic supporter in Alice Meynell, the Catholic versifier, critic and protector of poets – she and her husband, Wilfred Meynell, also nurtured the talent of the wayward Francis ...”

“... collector of the old style, so courteous as to be practically indistinguishable from his butler’. So the next morning they took the precaution of leaving Widener’s car a quarter of a mile from Barnes’s house. When they arrived, the door was opened and, ‘after careful scrutiny by a man who could be properly described as a roughneck (one could ...”

“... at 10 Rillington Place, West London, an address later notorious as the home of the mass murderer John Christie. The same Home Secretary, Maxwell Fyfe, by now a ‘charlatan’ with ‘all the arrogance of the truly ignorant’, contended that there had been no miscarriage of justice and was content to believe that by an odd coincidence two murderers had ...”

“... on the Vichy theme – an unflagging literary collaborator: he translated Arnold Bennett, Butler, Coleridge, Landor and Whitman, championed Faulkner and Unamuno, supervised Auguste Morel’s translation of Ulysses. He was – that extinct species – an homme de lettres. And a man of letters: his correspondence with Gide, Proust, Joyce and ...”

“... hard for most Parisians, but Ayer lived in Guy de Rothschild’s house in Paris, supported by a butler, a cook and a good cellar. When this arduous postwar service was over he returned to Oxford, at a time when philosophy in Oxford had yet to become Oxford philosophy and, in his view (Ryle, perhaps, apart, and H.H. Price), needed a good shaking. Real ...”

“... contains references to Wayne Koestenbaum, Gertrude Stein, George Oppen, Robin D.G. Kelley, Judith Butler, Fred Moten and Wendy Brown. In as far as this amorphous work can be defined, On Freedom is an example of a recent genre that takes as its subject the phenomenon of mass scolding on the left – you could call it ‘cancel culture’, though she doesn’t ...”

“... fitful intimation. Art, or theory, is the enemy of the natural and familiar. Felski quotes Judith Butler as denigrating the familiar in contrast to the other or unknown, a standard postmodern move; but one continues to hope in one’s churlish, outmoded way that the species will remain unfamiliar with global nuclear war, while recalling that the familiar for ...”

“... however, Young thought that the Early Victorian period had fallen into contempt, and by 1917 John Morley’s Recollections confessed that ‘critics today are wont to speak contemptuously of the mid-Victorian age.’ Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians was published in May the following year – a revenge, at least in part, on the Victorian values ...”

“... touted names in contemporary North American literary criticism and theory: Eve Sedgwick, Judith Butler, Jonathan Goldberg, Judith Fetterley, Jean Schwind, Elizabeth Ammons. Acocella takes no prisoners. She is queen of the devastating citation, and more than happy to let the jargon-mad professors hang themselves. Thus poor Robert Nelson, author of a 1988 ...”

“... my pieces passed through the office. In his mind only men were philosophers. The other was Judith Butler. I had written a commentary on one of her books, and she wrote a reply to be published along with it. In the draft of her response, she referred to me by my surname and, once, as ‘he’. Just a few lines later she wrote: ‘It is surely important to ...”

“... privation, they did so not out of a supererogatory deference to the existing order, but because Butler and Beveridge and the Attlee administration brought about a quiet but enduring revolution. At the same time, the nationalisation of large sections of the industrial base, and an economic climate that was delivering full employment, had shifted power ...”

“... horsemen defeating Persians at the battle of Al-Qadissiya (AD 637). It is in the style of Lady Butler painting British cavalry engagements in the last century. This painting forms the outer circle: the inner circle is of sand, realistically strewn with ancient armour, the helmets and weapons of the fallen. The greenjackets wanted to remind us that there is ...”

“... obvious choices: it does not include Isaiah Berlin’s The Hedgehog and the Fox, for instance, nor John Bayley’s Tolstoy and the Novel. Though not biographical, they might have been useful: after all, everyone already knows that Sonya and her sister Tanya were the joint models for Natasha in War and Peace. On the other hand, Ms Edwards has read In the ...”

“... Brigade. In recent years there has been a conservative revival, apparent in the reappearance of John Buchan on the shelves, or the clean-cut manly values of Chariots of Fire. Churchill is modish again, and all the more so after the Falklands. Those who followed Southern Television’s series about the Churchill of the 1930s will recognise the extent to ...”