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“... diary lasts as long as its usefulness as a measure of his hopefulness lasts. When hope dies [italics mine] he packs it in.’ In the letters of two Suffolk-born brothers and their sister we dip into a moving war-story. Donald, an airman, is captured by the Japanese in Malaya and is murdered on a jungle march, and his younger brother ...”

“... from the circumstance of its being directed against a lady? After some heart-searching, I can only hope not. And certainly Dr Sitwell, like Dr Leavis, erected a sufficient barrier of silliness around herself. But perhaps her better poetry deserves more pausing before than is here attempted. The obsessional life and astonishing output of Georges Simenon are ...”

“... but Mr Levin claims that he himself ‘legitimised enthusiasm’ (his emphasis). I am drawn to his hope of glimpsing into transcendental things, but most of this offensive book is accusatory: if you don’t talk big, and think big, like Levin, you are somehow anti-life. Why should we be told about his eating something, stuffed with something else, sauté’d ...”

“... who battened on the spa trade spread the notion that self-treatment held out as little hope of salvation as saying one’s prayers at home and never going to church. The ritual and the socialising, along with the change of climate and scenery, were part of the cure, if not all of it, as even the doctors sometimes admitted. For about twenty years ...”

“... historians, aiding them with sponsored conferences and collections of vetted documents, in the hope that they would adopt the view that structural forces – alliance problems, imperialism – caused the war, rather than decisions made primarily in Berlin and Vienna. Revisionism, the heading under which these arguments fall, triumphed in the interwar years ...”

“... may be dubious, it cannot be denied that it yields some interesting insights. Terence Hawkes, Christopher Norris and Jacqueline Rose show how the attempts of some influential Shakespeare critics to reduce the plays to coherent unified structures break down as the gaps and contradictions of the texts are carried over by an uncanny transfer to their own ...”

“... between creative mind and intransigent world, exploring a realm of Stevensian ‘poverty’ in the hope of its transcendence. This is not a model which denies poetic development. Yet, by arguing that ‘when a new reality is born and exerts its pressure on poets, their resisting pressure of language and imagination generates a new poetic,’ Vendler limits the ...”

“... trash Corbyn. They were desperate enough even to give space – twice – to Blair himself, in the hope of rehabilitating him. Naturally, the paper lost many readers, including me. Corbyn’s victory was not based on ultra-leftism. His views reflected what many in the country felt, and this is what anti-Corbyn Labour found difficult to grasp. Corbyn spelled it ...”

“... against the Continental viruses of open class antagonism and political extremism. Rachelle Hope Saltzman’s study of the activities and attitudes of the hundreds of thousands of strike volunteers allows us to look more carefully into that celebratory narrative. Saltzman seems an unlikely chronicler of the events: she is American (as I am); she ...”

“... Doris would always be together. I wasn’t in my most graceful frame of mind. ‘Dear Christ, I hope not!’ I had a picture of Doris gunning it up towards Peter, and each failing ever to get away from the other. Like the Pleiades. Always away from and towards their doom, shrieking, ‘Will you never leave me alone?’ while they fruitlessly fled for the ...”

“... moral high tension, its relish for detail. And they did. No one in their right mind would say (I hope) that The Light of the World is the same kind of achievement as The Blue Rigi or Interior at Petworth; but it is an achievement: it cares nothing for artistic good manners; it is not in hiding from the agonies of its age. Almost all visual art made in ...”

“... bombings.) When Cherie Blair said in June 2002, ‘As long as young people feel they have got no hope but to blow themselves up you are never going to make progress,’ Downing Street apologised. What need never be apologised for is the violence of state power. But perhaps there is a logic here. If the case for war is weak – or non-existent – then the ...”

“... in the context of his avowed admiration of Cézanne, to be a betrayal not an advance. In 1952 Christopher Isherwood gave E. M. Forster two bottles of claret and a painting by Vaughan. His work made an ideal gay to gay present; the male nude, or nude in landscape were his main, almost his only subjects, and the steady sale of his smaller works seems to ...”

“... that we attend PT wearing all our ‘kit’, except blankets. (I will never call a child of mine Christopher.) The same letter gives, incidentally, a clear view of the left-wing political position that Reed, for all his aristocratic fantasies, was never to abandon: ‘I hope,’ he wrote, ‘a good deal from Russia, of ...”

“... Cecil Day Lewis, Stephen Spender, William Plomer and Lehmann himself. Through Spender he met Christopher Isherwood. The friendship with Spender from the very first seemed edgy, uncertain and uneasy, but durable for all that. Isherwood he loved, but he was tolerated, rather than loved, in return. Spender and Isherwood were spending much of their time in ...”