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“... with payment records and phone data detailing their contact with journalists, pleaded guilty. PC Paul Flattley, who was stationed in Kensington and Chelsea, received a total of £7500 for 39 tips: he told the paper about the theft of a handbag from Zara Phillips, and about Hans Rausing’s failure to stop after a traffic accident. Flattley’s handler, the ...”

“... Derrida’s elaborate readings of Kafka, Geoffrey Hartman’s of Christopher Smart, or Barbara Johnson’s of Zora Neale Hurston, to see how much analysis of text and modification of the canon have gone into deconstructive theorising. But why should Steiner, who wants to replace commentary with ‘performance answering performance’, suddenly insist on ...”

“... popular and influential in their time. They range from the work of witty polemicists like Harvey Johnson, who in 1903 examined the failings of white society, asking whether whites could ever be trusted to govern themselves, to that of entertaining frauds like J.E. Blayechettai, a lecturer on the black church circuit in the Twenties, who claimed to be an ...”

“... it seems to me, do they diagnose the real challenge which Derrida is now obliged to face. Barbara Johnson’s painstaking translation of La Dissémination (1972) certainly comes to us as a dividend of American preoccupation with Derrida. But the questions which it raises go beyond his current notoriety, and recall us to the literary and intellectual context ...”

“... this book I cannot explain,’ he wisely concedes.) But he has come up with a nice idea. Just as Paul Fussell set himself, in The Great War and Modern Memory, to map the mythicisation of the First World War in the popular conscience – the images and icons we remember it by, and how these are themselves symptomatic of the selective desires, prejudices and ...”

“... with other novels, even those that are called experimental. Usually in such books – in B.S. Johnson, say, or Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005) – the messing around with words is designed to be expressive: this page is split in half because the character is in two minds; this page is fragmented because the character ...”

“... of literature: while we need not believe, as the Florentines of Petrarch’s day did, that St Paul wept at Virgil’s tomb, neither should we suppose that, even though his Roman flock spoke Greek, he could get by in that city without understanding a word of Latin. Nor indeed, although it has virtually monopolised the study of Roman bilingualism, was Greek ...”

“... repression it met with, is, in retrospect, an extraordinary thing in itself. Like W.E.B. Du Bois, Paul Robeson, Charlotta Bass, Claudia Jones and William Patterson in the 1940s and 1950s, the Black Panther Party connected the oppression of black America to people of colour around the globe, linking the internal struggle against racism in the US to ...”

“... least partly fictional (A Rock and a Hard Place: One Boy’s Triumphant Story by ‘Anthony Godby Johnson’, The Heart Is Deceitful above All Things by ‘J.T. LeRoy’, Kathy’s Story by Kathy O’Beirne), people felt aggrieved. They didn’t want imagined misery: no matter the quality of the imagination, they wanted experienced misery as recounted by the ...”

“... known as ideas, which is one of the least creditable reasons to admire Cobbett, Orwell or Samuel Johnson. If they aren’t able to extricate the man or woman ‘behind’ the work, they tend to feel a little cheated. Their fondness for biography, a superior version of what the media know as ‘human interest’, goes hand in hand with their philistinism. It ...”

“... quotes an excoriation of institutionalised racism, given at a 1943 New York rally on a bill with Paul Robeson and Vice-President Henry Wallace. Welles’s debut as a political orator was as sensational in its way as his first forays into theatre and the movies. ‘Until the other day,’ the New Yorker noted, ‘we regarded Orson Welles as simply an ...”

“... of literature in our time. Its two predecessors, The Imaginary Library (1982) and Samuel Johnson and the Impact of Print (first published in 1987 as Printing Technology, Letters and Samuel Johnson), which were issued by a different publisher, were less sourly jokey and less apocalyptic. The first in particular ...”

“... and entertain them with the softnesses of Love.’ He didn’t mean this as a compliment. When Dr Johnson invented the ‘metaphysical poets’ as a category, he objected along similar lines: The metaphysical poets were men of learning, and to show their learning was their whole endeavour; but, unluckily resolving to show it in rhyme, instead of writing ...”

“... shameful days is Tom Bingham, the ex-lord chief justice and legal philosopher, who would have had Johnson scuttling for cover. Both from Balliol, one a credit to the college, the other not. I don’t relish the dilemma of the fellows of Balliol when they are called on to dole out the prime minister’s honorary fellowship. At least when it comes to his ...”

“... and death – as veneration. The will to believe such accounts can have terrible repercussions. Paul Veyne, the great classicist, wrote a justly celebrated book, Did the Greeks Believe in their Myths?, in which he makes clear that we can’t know the answer. The literal, physical reality of aerial creatures, like that of divine creatures, has undoubtedly ...”