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“... beauty, sweet reason must veil their heads, they must give way to arguments of power.’ Robert Graves writes in his autobiography that, back in the hills of Harlech, he found himself ‘still mentally and nervously organised for war’, automatically sizing up the landscape for places to site a Lewis-gun and provide cover for his rifle-grenade ...”

“... of the Guildford Four are a politically heterogeneous bunch: at one end, Cardinal Basil Hume, Robert Kee, Merlyn Rees, Lord Scarman and the late Lord Devlin; at the other, rhetoric-ridden, far-left Trotskyist groupings. And in between the world and its dog. The only thing on which all are agreed – some with more knowledge of the facts than others – is ...”

“... A Vindication of Natural Society, appeared in May 1756. It was well received and its publisher Robert Dodsley offered 20 guineas for the copyright of the Philosophical Enquiry plus a further ten if it reached a third edition. The offer was accepted and the work was published in April 1757, six weeks after Burke married Nugent’s daughter Jane. He had also ...”

“... local ‘Society’ not even Shatov is sane. A clinical finding to that effect would not greatly alter our understanding of the novel. Possession by an idea is a common form of insanity. But did the entire community go temporarily mad – the governor’s wife, the governor, Stepan Trofimovich’s protectress, who broke with him because he had not kept her ...”

“... they believe, would be contrary to God’s will. Neo-conservative gentiles such as John Bolton; Robert Bartley, the former Wall Street Journal editor; William Bennett, the former secretary of education; Jeane Kirkpatrick, the former UN ambassador; and the influential columnist George Will are also steadfast supporters. The US form of government offers ...”

“... too, but the war made its way into the nervous system of her poems indirectly and mysteriously. Robert Lowell was a high-profile conscientious objector, writing to Roosevelt in September 1943 with a ‘Declaration of Personal Responsibility’ which objected to the mining of the Ruhr Dams and the bombing of Hamburg. He concluded: In 1941 we undertook a ...”

“... was never going to get out of the land of disgrace, as Densher was never going to make any money. Robert Pippin, in an excellent recent book called Henry James and Modern Moral Life, summarises these dilemmas starting from Densher’s point of view.3 Pippin says Densher can’t take the money because he can’t, in the end, act ‘as if no great moral ...”

“... a work co-authored by two pillars of the foreign policy establishment of the time, Joseph Nye and Robert Keohane, whose first edition – it went through many – appeared in 1977. Though presented as a system of norms and expectations that helped assure continuity between different administrations in Washington by introducing ‘greater discipline’ into ...”

“... fact to consummate fiction, or their indiscriminate blending of sources, or the way they alter and animate portraits that are known to us – filling out a dress, making a sitter stand – but the extent to which they are a product of, and perpetuate, a wild biographical knowledge, where unproved or contested facts are written into the story, and ...”

“... are. Graeber, an American who teaches anthropology at Goldsmith’s in London, is a veteran of the alter-globalisation movement, which sought debt forgiveness for the global South. Closely involved in planning the occupation of Zuccotti Park in Lower Manhattan that began last September, Graeber, who describes himself as an anarchist, joined those successfully ...”

“... off. It’s a good service, a model, with none of the speakers – his two sons, Richard Eyre and Robert Bathurst – outstaying their welcome and Ben vividly recalled.Bathurst is particularly good, reading a Betjeman poem about golf, following it up with a very funny (and almost better) poem in parody by Ben himself. Since I know him chiefly from ...”

“... bureaucrats were constantly obliged to mingle and find common ground. The economic historian Robert Millward points out that the popular notion of nationalisation in Europe as a 1940s phenomenon, driven by the perceived failures of capitalism in the 1930s and the successes of the planned economy in wartime, ignores the earlier history of state direction ...”

“... every poll shows how little they believe in what their rulers say, and how powerless they feel to alter what they do. Yet these are still societies in which elections are regularly held, and governments that become too disliked can be evicted. No one doubts that democracy, in this minimal sense, obtains. At European level, however, there is all too obviously ...”

“... Another drawing was done with a nurse’s blue pencil on the flyleaf of a volume of The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson.‘These drawings were presented to me by a very ill man,’ the catalogue entry read, quoting Edward Adamson, the art therapist who first encountered J.J. Beegan in 1946. By the time they met, Adamson explained, Beegan ‘had been in a ...”

“... is the second part of a two-part interview. Part 1: ‘You Muddy Fools’ I want to ask you about Robert Lowell: as an influence on your work, that is, and only then as what he later became – a ‘Life’, the subject of your first full-length biography. You did and do admire him greatly as a poet, yet in his poetic practice didn’t he trample all over the ...”