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“... gangsters, fought with the Italian Arditi, kept a mistress in Sicily, reported the Greco-Turkish war from the wilds of Anatolia’ etc, etc. He did none of these things, but he developed the skills to describe them better than if he had. And yet perhaps the truth is not entirely mocked. Even before we know about Hemingway we can feel that the pleasure of ...”

“... just a handful of the Morris Boys, was considered precocious troublemaking, and duly expelled from class as stylistically, politically and just about every other way-ally unfit for consumption or discussion. Harper’s used to know how to write in English, the gnarly old teachers said; Willie Morris brought the American jazz that made the language howl and ...”

“... She even hinted at a Missing Will. I listened and pondered.’ Shortly before World War Two, Michael dropped the name ‘Nathan’ and adopted ‘Wharton’. His wife had borne him a son and he wanted to make a new start in life, to become ‘more responsible, soundly based and honest’, now that he was a father. ‘I wanted to escape once and ...”

“... womb and cunt expressed by the words because, bottom (in all senses bottom button, bottom of the class, bottom of the sea, bottom of his heart), woman, yes ... Ich bin der Fleisch der stets bejaht. I am the flesh that always affirms: Parrinder happily takes Joyce’s word for that sentiment. ‘The central subject of Ulysses and Finnegans Wake,’ he ...”

“... she was heroic, as when she delivered medical supplies to soldiers during the First World War by toddling over enemy lines in an old Ford. And in World War Two, she was honoured by the French Resistance for transmitting information during the Occupation. ‘Gertrude Stein, safe, safe, is safe’, came the press ...”

“... conflict, he warned against the ‘demagogues’ who would suppress dissent in order to push their war agenda: Any argument against the war itself, and any criticism of the persons appointed to carry it on, will become aid and comfort to the enemy. The war will not only become moral over ...”

“... only of the Palestinian perpetrators. Palestinians who live in houses abandoned during the 1948 war have been evicted to make room for Jewish former owners and their descendants, but the reverse has yet to occur. Jerusalem was once the cultural, political and commercial capital for Palestinians, connected to Bethlehem in the south and Ramallah in the ...”

“... on the ‘arts’ that would distinguish Rome, the ‘arts’ of imperial rule that lay in making war and peace, leaving to ‘others’ the creative arts of working in bronze and marble, and the intellectual arts of rhetoric and astronomy. No contemporary would have missed the implication that those ‘others’ were Greeks. The Romans had a good line in ...”

“... and the book comes into its own when Malinowski arrives in Australia, on the eve of the Great War, and begins the expeditions to Papua that effectively marked the beginning of modern anthropology. Malinowski revolutionised field methods. Asked once whether he had met any savages, J.G. Frazer was horrified: ‘But heaven forbid!’ His method was to ...”

“... research. In spring 1938 they briefly moved back to New Guinea, and returned to New York only when war threatened in 1939. Here they had a daughter, the child Mead had always longed for (her friend Dr Spock was her paediatrician). But the war separated them. Bateson served overseas with the OSS while Mead was drawn into ...”

“... of Asia that Weber was to devote a large part of his reviving energies up to the end of the war. His intention was to show that other religions could not have produced the effects that a Puritanical Christianity had produced in Europe. But the drafts also betray Weber’s growing conviction that people’s religion is fundamental to their character and ...”

“... as almost anything but writing – baseball, boxing, game-fishing, lion-hunting, bullfighting or war. In a way, he was as ungenerous to himself as he was to most other writers, including some he certainly did learn from, like Ford Madox Ford, Gertrude Stein and Sherwood Anderson. Yet very good writers, including Ford and Pound and Joyce, recognised ...”

“... and the legendary jazz scene – Truman may have heard Charlie Parker live – was a middle-class affair found in labour union halls rather than bordellos. Two Irish gangs, the Goats and the Rabbits, fought for control of the city. Tom Pendergast, the cunning, sickly boss of the Goats, ran his operations out of a two-storey building on Main ...”

“... was brought up in Cambridge, the son of the professor of medieval history and himself a post-war Apostle. He begins by whisking us round the colleges telling us what each was like in Victorian times and how the abolition of the religious Tests and the Royal Commission (1872) transformed Cambridge from being a provincial seminary and a federation of ...”

“... in an uncompleted work in six thick volumes which had been gathering dust since their pre-war publication by a university press. Suddenly, astoundingly, Toynbee was news. The effect was shattering. One of the things that was to be shattered, in due course, was Toynbee’s academic reputation. In the Fifties he encountered keen criticism from academic ...”