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“... palpable by the end of Victoria’s reign. That is the framework of a book whose merits are its broad scope and vivid detail rather than cogent argument. This is to be expected, perhaps, once Hunt has warned us that he will concentrate on ideas. ‘Too much recent urban history,’ he says, ‘has retreated into a tale of bureaucratic development – of ...”

“... purposive, energetic-sounding verb ‘moved into’, is meaningless unless it is explained that William Golding’s The Paper Men was a late, and lame, novel of remarkable thinness by an old famous author about being a famous author. It was metafictional only in the way that reality TV is metatelevisual. Stevenson never reflects on a writer’s aesthetic ...”

“... been ‘unwaveringly rejected by our more powerful pundits of musical taste’ – Hans Keller, William Glock and Peter Heyworth. For someone like Keller, the gatekeeper of the debate about new music in the 1960s and 1970s, Cardew was a godsend: Keller might not agree with what he wrote, but he enjoyed orchestrating the subsequent controversy. Cardew became ...”

“... for later antiquities. The National Trust, which had been founded by admirers of Ruskin and William Morris to preserve threatened areas of countryside, had, at first, no remit to take on buildings. With its ethos of inspired amateurism, however, this ‘dedicated group of happy-go-lucky enthusiasts’, as Lees-Milne called them, was more ...”

“... sentiment, Martha,’ he beams. Martha wears the same gloomy sub fusc, with black bonnet and broad linen collar. Putting slang in puritan mouths is fun because we know that precision and decorum in speech were hallmarks of righteousness. Puritans were sticklers, who defied Satan, abolished Christmas and hunted witches. Priggish and sexless, they were ...”

“... our common European heritage, and our debt to this heritage in the past and the future’. Such a broad, serious and fundamentally political claim makes this book more than mere necromancy. Filial piety plays a role, but Murray has his eye on bigger themes, including the purpose of historical study and the future (if it has one; Murray is pessimistic on that ...”

“... in trust and sign over his house in Chelsea to his daughter Margaret Roper and her husband, William. The works More wrote while imprisoned in the Tower were an eloquent and intricate account of one man’s faith and its trials, but they are also suffused with longing for the family he missed.More didn’t just love his family, he also educated ...”

“... have become, too much aware of what might theoretically be made of contemporary social situations. William Trevor’s Felicia’s Journey should have been a very good novel but failed to be, because the author gave up his own involuntary and unconscious literary personality in favour of a plot that must have looked absolutely right – too right – for this ...”

“... product-placement we have come to expect: ‘Christina ... began writing with her 22-carat gold broad-nibbed Parker Duofold pen.’ The artful book-jacket keys us in: a string of pearls, a pair of sunglasses, four wedding rings for four farcical marriages; a scarlet lipstick; the dented tops of two bottles of Diet Coca-Cola. (Diet Coke was Christina’s ...”

“... walls and dig trenches, Blemish picks their pockets with villainous glee. And here we descend to broad and savage satire. The very names shade into allegory, including that of Esposito, which derives from the old custom of ‘exposing’ illegitimate babies on the steps of the church or at the door of the orphanage for adoption. Esposito is a bastard. But ...”

“... new information, which incidentally does not greatly enlarge the sum of human knowledge about the broad story of the Cambridge spies. He has not been taken for a ride: rather, he provides a treasury of personal detail, not least about Philby’s life in Moscow, the pin-striped suit and red braces he wore to his favourite Georgian restaurant, his skill at ...”

“... provides nothing in the way of proof for any of them; his argument consists largely of a series of broad and often glib generalisations. His narrative is confused and fragmented (as well as poorly translated and sloppily published). More to the point, however, this is a book that rests on a highly questionable premise: the familiar claim that fundamentalism is ...”

“... perilously momentous realm of history.’ Northrop Frye regards the Bible as fiction because, like William Blake, from whom he derives his title, he comes near to identifying religion with creativity. To that extent he is an ally of Alter: but to him the focus of creativity is not in narrative but in myth; and myth is a construct – ‘it belongs to the world ...”

“... Here is the visiting lecturer, Lord Pinkrose:   He was a rounded man, narrow-shouldered and broad-hipped, thickening down from the crown of his hat to the edge of his greatcoat. His nose, blunt and greyish, poked out between collar and hat-brim. His eyes, grey as rain-water, moved about, alert and suspicious, like the eyes of a chameleon. They paused a ...”

“... to pay the electricity bill. Ian was my first British friend – a man of liberal sympathies, broad understanding, and a desire to spend vacations in West Germany. Despite the many years since our last conversation, I often find myself nostalgically drifting back to West Parade. The hellish North Sea wind tore through the third-floor apartment every day ...”