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“... at the top of the steps looking cool and fresh; she knew how fresh she must look, like other young girls.’ What was unobvious in Bowen’s prose held out a promise, even as it frustrated my efforts at comprehension: it seemed to say that nothing was, after all, obvious – everything was interesting, because complicated. Needing this to be true, I ...”

“... and journeymen printers in 1730s Paris. Peeved by their stuck-up master and his mistress, these young men gleefully slaughtered their employers’ pampered cat, together with all the cats in the neighbourhood. It is a good story in its own right. But Darnton read it anthropologically – as a play of symbols, which the apprentices manipulated as effectively ...”

“... dinner plate), not Ottoline. The ‘very great doctor’ (page 139) should be glossed as based on Roger Vittoz, who treated Ottoline (and later T.S. Eliot) at Lausanne. The Introduction also gives us ‘the facts’ at the expense of the meaning. Its history of the novel’s evolution is so bald that an uninstructed reader could scarcely make head or tail of ...”

“... Ribbons and bunting gave the shallow tumulus the appearance of a place of pilgrimage. Fathers led young children by the hand, so that they would get an authentic taste of it – mortality, the survival of pre-posthumous fame. Hollywood has, since Valentino, lost its vampiric piety. Hereditary royalty is an unconvincing soap opera. The Krays have replaced all ...”

“... o’er the dead. So there were principles at stake. And the writers – most of them astoundingly young – had, well, a blast. Carr follows her subjects from the beginning of their association until the third and final Imagist anthology in 1917 (a retrospective anthology came out in 1930, giving Carr her dénouement). Much emotional drama is purloined from ...”

“... communication through which people, things and messages pass in both directions. Mind the traffic.Roger Luckhurst’s ambitious and consistently informative cultural history of the corridor makes brief mention of The Maltese Falcon in accounting for film noir’s preoccupation with bleakly anonymous lobbies, passages and hallways. But it’s not the skills ...”

“... only knew a few politicians’). What emerges from the Kissinger and Brzezinski memoirs, and from Roger Morris’s hostile account of Haig’s career, is not only the extent and the seriousness of the in-fighting that accompanies the process of nomination: the ensuing struggle for access to the President takes on a life, and a reality, all of its own. This ...”

“... and work: I was invited to speak about his time at Cambridge. The conference papers, edited by Roger Bowen, have been published, and Dr Bowen has also written an appreciative biography. Japanese studies being his subject, he is well qualified to weigh up the writings on modern Japan of Herbert Norman, a missionary’s son who grew up there. Very different ...”

“... Bentwoods answerable for the decay that surrounds them? And why does everyone Sophie meets, from a young couple at a cocktail party – the boy in ‘an army fatigue jacket’ and the girl in a white leather suit – to the old woman from whom she tries to buy an omelette pan, treat her with such awful condescension? These are not comfortable questions, and ...”

“... in the late 1960s. Greeting the publication of G.E. Moore’s Principia Ethica in 1903, the young Strachey imagined that ‘the truth’ was ‘really now upon the march’ and that ‘the Age of Reason’ had dawned at last. But reading his letters in a new century makes the brave efforts at sexual enlightenment seem sadder than they once did, while ...”

“... at the British Council in 2004 he appreciatively cited Goodhart along with Melanie Phillips and Roger Scruton in a disquisition on the ‘core values of Britishness’ (‘There is indeed a golden thread that runs through British history of the individual standing firm for freedom and liberty against tyranny’). On a trip to East Africa the following ...”

“... by asking whether it was appropriate for the signatories of the letter to teach impressionable young adults. The claim that the left has shut down ‘free speech’ on immigration and race has been widely aired, and some will see the Conway Hall row as yet more evidence supporting that claim. Others might see two media-savvy academics and a cranky ...”

“... two of the three anonymous reviewers had been sceptical, the world’s leading papyrologist, Roger Bagnall, had pronounced the fragment genuine. King had assured Sabar that with some minor revisions the HTR would go ahead and publish, which in due course it did.Hell hath no fury like a journalist deceived. Four years later, after the text’s claims to ...”

“... during the battle. Under an apple tree in Cassino, Melville placed a cigarette in the mouth of a young man who’d been shot. ‘He took two drags and then he died. Imagine, springtime in the Italian countryside … and here is this young man dying at twenty. Reality always surpasses cinema in war films.’ Demobilised in ...”

“... heard a pun. One does not arrest Voltaire ... and you can’t stop him either. Who started him? Roger Garaudy, it seems, with an inviting bet in 1954: ‘Let’s try and explain the same character, I according to Marxist methods, you according to existentialist methods.’ So began a project whose aim Sartre expresses on the first page of The Family Idiot ...”