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“... on the cultural politics of André Malraux, and best of all, a brilliantly revealing chapter by Michael Fried on the spectator-centred aesthetics of Diderot in his Salons. The association of words with music is traced from the jongleurs in the 11th century through its successive manifestations as an element of courtly spectacle to interesting chapters on ...”

“... optimism -‘cheerfulness in the bunker’ – before polling day in the 1874 General Election. ‘Michael Foot might have said it during the 1983 campaign’ is a cheeky aside, given that Jenkins evidently expects his readers to remember who was in which bunker at the relevant moment. There is more to Gladstone, however, than politics. His restless energy ...”

“... via Yeats, Synge, Francis Ledwidge, Padraig Colum and one or two others: no Joyce, James Stephens, Joseph Campbell, F.R. Higgins, Donagh MacDonagh or W.R. Rodgers. It’s hard not to feel that John Montague’s Faber Book of Irish Verse of 1974 offers a rather more satisfactory selection from the middle part of this century. Kinsella is at pains to repudiate ...”

“... than once, the claim that science is non-political is itself a political claim.Baker was joined by Michael Polanyi, a Hungarian-born, Manchester-based physical chemist turned anti-positivist philosopher of science. Through the CCF’s Paris office, the CIA approached Polanyi with the proposal that he edit an occasional newsletter, Science and ...”

“... truth: ‘but, alas, eternity!’ or ‘I, I, the future that mends everything’. And yet, as Michael Hofmann has argued, Jarrell the poet is really at his most original when he is at his most wayward and leisurely, in prolix, rambling pieces like ‘The End of the Rainbow’, which presents the life of an ageing New England-born landscape painter called ...”

“... still tweets their names: Martin Francis Bane, 3 months; Mary Margaret Jordan, 18 months; John Joseph Mills, 5 months. Feeney herself is creative director of the Tuam Oral History Project, an archive of survivor testimonies.This history echoes throughout As You Were. We hear of one pregnant woman about to be sent to Tuam in the early 1950s. When she ...”

“... but that’s because we have a monarchy which is not only a religion but a popular cult: it’s Michael Jackson as well as Runcie. The younger royals instinctively understand that they are a sort of super pop-star, and, while they may occasionally complain about it, the fact is that, as any pop star must, they court tabloid attention, are indeed largely ...”

“... Michi was nobody is certain: a forgotten manager, an outsider, one of the chori or colonos called Michael? The other surviving settlements in the Perené Colony, Pampa Silva and Pampa Whaley, are also named after dead functionaries. In the version we hear from some of those who laboured on the plantation, all three bosses were killed by indigenous people. But ...”

“... his father had him locked up for a few minutes in a police cell, an episode that became, as Michael Wood puts it, the ‘myth of origin’ for his powerful distrust of authority. Ackroyd rummages dutifully for further evidence. Was young Alfred beaten at school by a ‘black-robed Jesuit’? Or caught out in the open when the Zeppelins raided London in ...”

“... started a new album, ‘EGYPT’. On the first page, a collage of stamps of King Farouk, who, like Michael of Romania, was a boy at his accession. The stamps are the first issue of his reign, designed in 1937. Later in the album we find the revised design of 1944, by which time Farouk was 24 and wearing a manly moustache on his rather pudgy face. The Farouk ...”

“... the genealogy of Jesus in particular: all that begetting! But what exactly does descent entail? Joseph is of the House of David, but he is in no sense consanguineous; his is not the eidos that bore Christ’s essence and quickened the matter in Mary’s womb. That would be God. The prophecy is fulfilled because of a particular understanding of ...”

“... not to repeat their lèse-majesté. David Landes takes the story from the scholar of Islam, Michael Cook. It is, for him, a moral tale. Autocracies squeeze, steal and demean. ‘Only societies with room for multiple initiatives,’ he insists, ‘from below more than from above, can think in terms of a growing pie.’ That is why they become rich. And ...”

“... had not only been her mentor and introduced her to the early conceptual artists, Dan Graham and Joseph Kosuth: he had taught her that ‘you just don’t sit down and write, you have to know why you write and why you use certain methodologies.’ In this context, she found in Burroughs a prose writer who ‘was dealing with how politics and language came ...”

“... half of all dismissals in the State and Commerce Departments, and in the CIA. Only 25 per cent of Joseph McCarthy’s fan letters complained of ‘red infiltration’; the rest fretted about ‘sex depravity’. The scare lasted from 1947 to the 1970s, and in The Lavender Scare David Johnson estimates that thousands lost their jobs. The men and women charged ...”

“... world: ‘The red sun was pasted in the sky like a wafer.’ The American novelist Joseph Hergesheimer, who read that sentence at the age of 15, ‘was appropriately amazed’. He repeated the line to everybody who would listen. ‘There was no doubt about my opinion of such a remarkable and modern paragraph – I was convinced it was ...”