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“... for a bit of reality: Life at last I know is terrible: The innocent scene, the innocent walls and light And hills for me are like the cavities Of surgery or dreams. The visible might Vanish, for all it reassures, in white. This apprehension has come slowly to me ... And what has brought it is being ‘Bored, systematically and sickeningly’ – by Service ...”

“... of the single author-owner the book culture-commerce of the West could not function. In the light of this, there is something genuinely anarchic in the recent post-structuralist call to liberate text from the appropriations of authorship. In post-structuralist analysis, the author is commonly reduced to a mere secondary ‘effect’ within the ...”

“... gay marriage is discovered those involved are punished savagely. In 1578, for instance, it came to light that there had been a series of weddings between members of a fraternity of Portuguese and Spanish men performed in Rome at the Church of San Giovanni a Porta Latina. They had been worried, apparently, about having sex before marriage. Instead of commending ...”

“... as one of the most mutually creative partnerships since the Brownings. Hamilton casts little new light on it. ‘It is pointless to speculate,’ he says flatly, ‘on the intimate details of a marriage which took place over a hundred years ago.’ So that’s that. De Morgan’s health forced him to give up pottery in 1905 and the business, which was always ...”

“... and shows the government, the prime minister and the political elite generally in about as bad a light as possible. It was probably inevitable that the Home Office would eventually undo so many ambitions. Its structure is ‘dysfunctional’, as everyone has noted, and as a department it is almost impossible to organise effectively. But that is not its main ...”

“... Two, the son of the English actor Hugh Williams, schooled by Life and Eton, a youthful toiler for Alan Ross’s London Magazine, an erstwhile globetrotter and a lifelong London resident, seems as English as they come. (So English, in fact, that he will object that his mother is Australian.) He simply makes it a more interesting condition than others succeed ...”

“... vote of no confidence in 1979. Thus old British Labourism perished for ever, not in the light (as Dangerfield wrote about the last stand of the old House of Lords) but in the creepy twilight of a rotten compromise.Milne’s narrative makes me re-live my youth, because it demonstrates the fashion in which these events were imbricated and ...”

“... of dollars of loans they have received from the West. Another would merely note that ‘Arabian light’, the petroleum that sets the base price of all forms of energy throughout the world, is selling for $10.11 cents a barrel, the lowest it has been since the Great Depression of the Thirties, taking inflation into account. Prices of other commodities ...”

“... a Marseille play of 1775, where knowledge of French, learnt in Paris, provides new status. In this light, it is difficult to understand how Le Roy Ladurie can argue that ‘of the two great human passions ... love and ambition, Occitan literature concerned itself above all with the first.’ He himself demonstrates that the first, love, centres on the ...”

“... had little time left over for occasional pieces. Those that do exist are more interesting for the light they throw on already published work than for themselves. Living, for example, is noted for its frequent omission of the definite article (rather as Russians do when speaking English). In a Paris Review interview in 1958 Green explained that this was to ...”

“... necessity that beat insistently against the back of his throat. He fought it off and struggled to light a cigarette. Smoke caught in his windpipe and he had just time enough to push his way back through the crush ... before he gave way to the temptation that had stood by him since falling down the stairs, and emitted a belching roar over a middle-aged man ...”

“... Raymond answered: ‘Reserve replacement.’) The era of ‘easy oil’, when domestic deposits of light sweet crude all but leapt to the surface, was long past. The material problem – of discovering and extracting a resource that is hidden under miles of rock or ocean or both, often in a form that is not amenable to easy pumping or shipping – was ...”

“... professor at the University of Missouri a generation earlier. The response to ‘A Matter of Light’, as the draft was called, was not encouraging. ‘I may be totally wrong,’ Williams’s agent, Marie Rodell, wrote, ‘but I don’t see this as a novel with high potential sale. Its technique of almost unrelieved narrative is out of fashion, and its ...”

“... American palaeontologist Joseph Leidy. Then there are ‘men who knew too much’ (Robert Hooke, Alan Turing, G.K. Chesterton and, predictably, Alfred Hitchcock) and those whose knowledge ‘changed everything’ (Shakespeare, Isaac Newton, James Clerk Maxwell). Everything-knowers are admired, though with qualifications: the ‘know-it-all’ is an ...”

“... the war (that included many Englishmen at the time, let alone now), heard about the Charge of the Light Brigade and the Lady with the Lamp tending wounded soldiers at Scutari. A belief has persisted that the war was more than usually senseless and inconsequential, but Figes rejects this, seeing it as a turning point in the history of Europe, of Russia and of ...”