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“... gone, but the thistle detail on the fireplace is accompanied by the Latin motto of the vanquished Stuart dynasty, ‘Nemo me impune lacessit,’ translated as ‘No one attacks me with impunity,’ or ‘Wha daur meddle wi’ me?’ ‘I am a Jacobite myself,’ Victoria reportedly told the Windsor Castle librarian. The original tartan carpets have not ...”

“... wash over you and just about kill you. Ride these out, and it’s like stepping from black and white into colour. Like water after days in the desert. Constant bliss in every atom.’ He did not feel that, maybe, but he could make a man who did. ‘I don’t remember what I did with all my real attention, what-all it was going towards,’ Fogle says. It ...”

“... a soft boy in a hard world?’ It’s a question asked by the hero’s older brother in Douglas Stuart’s Shuggie Bain, worthy winner of the 2020 Booker Prize, and it is just as much the preoccupation of his follow-up, Young Mungo, as shown by the new novel’s dedication: ‘For Alexander and all the gentle sons of Glasgow’. The worlds of the books are ...”

“... as a symptom of oncoming dementia. The next day I went to see the Medical Officer, an elegant white-faced man, quite young, who had given up a successful practice as a dermatologist, and I confided to him my anxieties. In doing so, I must have embarrassed him. ‘Don’t worry, old boy,’ he said over and over again, as he led me to the door of his ...”

“... Derrida. The piece was silently disappeared shortly after it emerged that it had been sourced from white supremacist and neo-Nazi websites. No senior journalist condemned it; Newton Dunn remains welcome on TV sofas.Loughborough University’s Centre for Research in Communication and Culture, which tracked the press coverage, showed how intense the press ...”

“... that kept us all ablaze these last few weeks and months. Bella Caledonia, Wee Ginger Dug, Rev. Stuart Campbell, Alec Finlay, Wheelie Bins for Yes – a cataract of stuff. God knows, in my hours online I wandered down some peculiar byways (the Spectator comments pages). The Better Together ‘Patronising Lady’ advert kept us entertained for ages. (Watch ...”

“... until they have ripped the guts out of these decent Victorian villas to turn them into models of white and modish minimalism.5 March. On my walk I pass the Primrose Hill Community Library, which is closed to borrowers today but open for children, who throng the junior library, some of them sitting with an adult presumably learning to read, others in groups ...”

“... Milton Keynes Development Corporation Architects’ Department. Forming a trio with the Americans Stuart Mosscrop and Fred Lloyd Roche, he favoured a clipped, sober modernism not a million miles from the work of the Grunt Group; devoid of rhetoric or melodrama, it was based on elegance of proportion more than aesthetic grandstanding, although here it derived ...”

“... questioning. This nation’s history is made up of a succession of struggles for rights, from the Stuart despotism, through the suffragette movement, the General Strike and the hunger marches to the more recent miscarriage of justice scandals, and the judges have throughout been on the side of authority and conservative reaction. There have been and continue ...”

“... architectural history of various subway systems and the theory of names as it developed from John Stuart Mill to Saul Kripke, with, by way of comparison, a solid account of necronym taboos among various tribes. Films, photographs and museum exhibits are everywhere used in evidence, as is an enormous range of recondite archival material. As the founder and ...”

“... lists human fat among the ingredients of his wonder-working oglio del Scoto; in Webster’s White Devil, Isabella dreams of preserving the flesh of her rival, Vittoria, ‘like mummia’, while in The Duchess of Malfi, Bosola imagines the body of the woman he has come to kill as no better than ‘a salvatory’ (or ointment box) filled with ‘green ...”

“... What is this? ‘Two miles behind it a jet of white steam was travelling from the left to the right of the picture.’ It is a train, viewed across a valley, in Jude the Obscure (1895), and it is the only sentence offered there about this train. Flaubert is always described as the great cinematic novelist, the great novelist of detail, and indeed Flaubert has his own described train-steam too – similarly seen, in L’Education sentimentale, across fields, but ‘stretched out in a horizontal line, like a gigantic ostrich feather whose tip kept blowing away ...”

“... The new annotators don’t mention this – Gifford gives no source – and quote instead from Stuart Gilbert, who found in a book called Les Tatouages a record of a prostitute in Naples who had a tattoo on her stomach of a naked woman on whose nipple was seen the numbers 16 and 6, ‘which in Neapolitan slang signify anterior and posterior ...”

“... couldn’t possibly have been a lover. His massive pipe was scarcely [sic] out for a start – the White Cottage carpets reeked of pipe tobacco for twenty years ... he hadn’t that ‘mind’s recoil upon itself’ which makes possible passionate uncertainty, the loss of all gravity which goes with falling in love, the giving-of-oneself, the abandon. He was a ...”

“... theological emphasis, there is no mention here of Dostoevsky, Rilke, Kafka, Bataille, Patrick White, Beckett, Nabokov, Bellow, Spark, Marilynne Robinson, Saramago or Coetzee (whose novel Diary of a Bad Year has several paragraphs on the afterlife). Nabokov’s work is shot through with a persistent mysticism; in Pnin, the author imagines the dead watching ...”