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“... the same that she does not allow the social and political implications of these plays their full weight, and that an undeclared but apparent bias against tragicomedy as a genre leads her to regard their endings as simpler and more glibly reassuring than they are. Several of the polarities she tries to set up seem suspect in the light of the best recent work ...”

“... though fresh and accurate, hews close enough to the standard judgments. Elsewhere he gives more weight to preference and prejudice. Aaron’s Rod fails to interest him (‘a loose improvisation of which not much need be said’), though Kangaroo, also a loose, hasty improvisation and also a political fantasy, is one of his favourites (‘the formlessness ...”

“... the upper auxiliary note of a trill, and the other things which worry our scholar-performers. The weight to be given to an up beat, how staccato is staccato, whether it is possible, or even sensible, to attempt a continuous legato, these are the issues – just as they would be in Beethoven or Chopin or, for that matter, Stravinsky. Kirkpatrick will annoy ...”

“... the 13 volumes as a great Victorian flagship, carrying with it, ‘as flagships do, the full weight of a nation consumed with the struggles of democracy at home, imperialism abroad, and a culture seeking to mediate the eclipsing of religion by the gospel of science’. The imperial foundations of the OED, as Willinsky uncovers them, are part racist (Max ...”

“... need not be undermined by historical self-awareness. And he shrewdly adds: That does not mean, as Richard Rorty likes to suggest, that we must slide into a position of irony, holding to liberalism as practical liberals, but backing away from it as reflective critics. That posture is itself still under the shadow of universalism: it suggests that you cannot ...”

“... other ex-communists, also contributed to The God That Failed, a 1949 book edited by the Labour MP Richard Crossman. He went on to foster a series of CIA-funded seminars, populated by Encounter contributors, in the Austrian ski resort of Alpbach.Koestler’s adventurous past in the Spanish Civil War, along with his explorations of cosmology (The ...”

“... who may have adopted interpretations different from our own. We must therefore not only give weight to our fellow citizens’ views in the decision-making process, but also construct a political and social system that delivers the conditions without which they could not exercise their capacity to establish and revise those views. In more concrete ...”

“... of writing from the US that the then editor Bill Buford labelled ‘dirty realism’, taking in Richard Ford, Raymond Carver, Bobbi Ann Mason and so on), has always belonged to her and her alone. ‘For me,’ she has written, this ‘no man’s land, a deeply specific isolation drenched in family stories and secrets, is a huge advantage for a ...”

“... excess. His friend the racial theorist, eugenicist and future ill-fated minister of agriculture Richard Walther Darré wrote Race: The New Nobility of the Blood and the Soil at his estate near Jena. Both belonged to the primitive, woodworking, neo-peasant, maypole-hugging ideological left of the NSDAP, in which broad church they were about as distant from ...”

“... Draper staring into space, Draper sending his secretary-cum-copywriter Peggy home with an electric weight-loss belt to see what it does (predictably, it’s a vibrator; the proposed slogan is ‘You’ll Love the Way It Makes You Feel’) – is desultory, and distracts only a little from the soap opera antics of bed-hopping and keeping secrets. It was ...”

“... by HarperCollins. Eve’s irritating editor, Amanda Farley-Brown, is crossing her fingers that Richard and Judy will feature a Genuine. But Eve is blocked, unable to begin work on the next book, and has decamped to a holiday house in Norfolk for a change of scene and to get away from dead people’s relations, taking her husband and two children with ...”

“... The evidence underpinning prosecutions was often wobbly, and judgment susceptible to the weight of social prejudices and assumptions. Racism was a driving force in the case of Shapurji Edalji, an Indian-born clergyman, and his son George. In 1888, contemptuous and threatening letters began to arrive at the Edalji family’s vicarage, and the ...”

“... When he died I had been away from home for a little over a year . . . I had discovered the weight of white people in the world. I saw that this had been for my ancestors and now would be for me an awful thing to live with and that the bitterness which had helped to kill my father could also kill me. Baldwin’s bitterness was fired by working in a ...”

“... and indecisive, could anyway not have stopped it – in his negative role, Gorbachev had less weight in the matter than Attlee in the independence of India. The arms reductions that followed are a more authentic merit, though one of direction rather than anything near completion. If they are one-sided, their terms simply acknowledge the realities of ...”

“... So meticulously thorough is Griffin that at times the material seems to be cracking under the weight of the scholarship brought to bear upon it, as when, for example, he subjects Russell’s undergraduate paper on epistemology to painstakingly detailed critical scrutiny. On the other hand, this attention to detail pays off in his interesting attempt to ...”