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“... to deserve that favourite epithet ‘odd’, and to meditate on the trouvaille. The Middle of the War carries on its rough, browning wartime pages lines that almost anybody might have written at the time on the first page: ‘the enormous finger of the gun’. But there are others that suggest a more characteristic insight: ‘ruins are implicit in every ...”

“... myth which started about 1830 and finished, roughly speaking, at the beginning of the First World War was followed by a positivist reaction. One of the main causes of this reaction was the insistence of most of the proponents of theories about myth that their theory alone explained all myths, or at least most of them. Some of the theories could be made to ...”

“... is a cleaner environment’). Meanwhile, the long period of economic growth since the Second World War had failed to make the distribution of income more equal. The poorest 20 per cent of families received 5 per cent of total family income in 1947, and 5.2 per cent in 1977; the share of the richest 20 per cent fell from 43 per cent to 41.5 per cent (and these ...”

“... as Popski once did in Private Army. Lyall has a feeling for battles long ago and knows his World War Two, which he has used in this way before. He could be said to be repeating himself. Certainly he seems to do so in another episode, the visit to a dying colonel playing with toy soldiers in a chateau in the Midi – pretty close, this, to the scene of the ...”

“... to gold in 1925. The climax of this volume is a fascinating survey by A.K. Cairncross of the post-war years. In its analysis of the reasons for Britain’s relatively poor growthmanship the only dimension missing is the political: the issue of the economic costs, direct and indirect, of the hangover of British imperialism. I would like to see this chapter ...”

“... to diamond ring emojis’. Can our heroine bring herself to want that, a complete melding with the class that enslaved hers? For her boyfriend’s father, the Harry-Meghan marriage is ‘inspiring stuff’, but for her? ‘I knew these were the things to want, the right things to reach for. But I felt sick of reaching, enduring. Of the ...”

“... of a myth, but it isn’t quite that. The story of Odysseus’ return home from the Trojan War would qualify as a myth, but the Odyssey does not, if a myth is a story that doesn’t depend for its resonance and power on the details and language of any one version. The Penelopiad is written very precisely in response not to the myth of Odysseus, but to ...”

“... politics before this; few of them had been on previous marches. I asked about the 2003 Stop the War march: ‘I was 11,’ they said: ‘I was 13 or 14.’ Everyone has plenty of reasons for being there: they want Malcolm Grant, the provost, to reverse his enthusiastic position on tuition fees, or to bring his £424,000 salary down in line with Oxford and ...”

“... She admired his ‘simple lines’, adding that ‘he taught me what was necessary.’ After the war she arranged to have the whole interior brought to London, where the architect (and fellow refugee) Ernst Freud adapted it to fit her mews house in Paddington. It took huge effort, a lot of money and many bureaucratic manoeuvres to get it out of Vienna, but ...”

“... of 11 April 1865, Abraham Lincoln spoke to a crowd in Washington about black suffrage. The Civil War had been over for a week. Lincoln had already walked the streets of Richmond, Virginia, the Confederate capital, taking in the devastation at first hand. ‘The only people who showed themselves were negroes,’ the radical senator Charles Sumner noted. The ...”

“... shattering of the status quo, this blow for a kind of morbid equality with Israel’s formidable war machine, has exacted a huge price.The fighters of Hamas and Islamic Jihad – brigades of roughly 1500 commandos – killed more than a thousand civilians, including women, children and babies. It remains unclear why Hamas wasn’t satisfied after achieving ...”

“... And then the men turned to their studies. Before long, almost every man was enrolled in a class, and some in three: classes on Marxist-Leninist theory, on economics and psychology, on literature and languages, and on history ancient and modern. As they remarked, they were privileged to have time to read and write and discuss. Except that they didn’t ...”

“... procedures, avoid the commonplace of maps, and hold yourself ready for adventure. The tourist class was invented by Thomas Cook when he assembled an excursion to the Paris Exposition in 1855. Tourists change their places in groups, live as comfortably as possible, take pleasure in gregariousness, obey injunctions, keep to the main roads, and fulfil plans ...”

“... to write about subjects in the forefront of popular consciousness: American football and nuclear war (End Zone, 1972), pop music (Great Jones Street, 1973), communications from outer space (Ratner’s Star, 1976), clandestine intelligence (Running Dog, 1978), terrorism (The Names, 1982), suburban life and ecological disaster (White Noise, 1985), the ...”