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“... very close to Pushkin, who combined a streak of robust, almost jingoistic patriotism with a keen sense for the arrogant ugliness of absolute power’. The translation of Eugene Onegin suggests a slightly different mix: a benign unforced urbanity, the mark of a civilised unaggressive sensibility which is never soft, though it is sometimes lax as Byron ...”

“... Jackson. Such high-profile acquisitions are seized upon by opportunistic commentators, all too keen to foster suspicions of Japanese duplicity, racism and greed. Writing about Japan, its society and its foreign affairs has to an overwhelming degree become the preserve of alarmist political economists. Yet who is served by the perpetuation of the simplistic ...”

“... never get through it in four days.’‘Then ask the judge,’ I said to him. ‘If she’s not keen on hearing it, nothing I can say will make it happen.’A desperate tone entered his voice. ‘Come on, Mr Renton, you and me. We’ve fought the good fight and fairly. I mean, if you were the one asking me …’I sighed. Mr Bowls was right, he’s always ...”

“... aahing, sentimental and nostalgic, with every mention of black Levis worn with Doctor Martens, of Peter Frampton and Art Gartfunkel, of homebrew wine at the parents’ house and fancy wine when you get invited round by old college friends who have done much better for themselves than you have. In an earlier draft of this article, I tried to construct a little ...”

“... a desire to save my soul.’ Four scholars were invited to reply to Coetzee – Marjorie Garber, Peter Singer, Barbara Smuts and Wendy Doniger – and all of them struggled in different ways to read his meanings. Singer seemed to suggest that Coetzee’s device was fundamentally evasive. ‘It’s a marvellous device, really. Costello can blithely criticise ...”

“... the 5th Earl Russell defied most conventional stereotypes of the aristocrat. But he possessed a keen awareness of his dynastic heritage: it determined both his sense of political obligation and his interpretation of English history. The story of the Russells was inextricably interwoven with the history of Whiggery and Liberalism, and after some early ...”

“... visit, during a tour in crippling heat of the ruined fortifications constructed around the port by Peter the Great, Wilhelm again forgot his instructions and buttonholed the Russian prime minister, Vladimir Kokovtsov, on one of his latest hobby-horses, the need to establish a pan-European oil trust to compete with American Standard Oil. The ...”

“... out to be more fickle than science allows for. Milton has been advised by his chiropractor friend Peter Takakis, who is around for the family’s traditional Sunday afternoon open-house debating session, that – since male sperm swim faster than female sperm – a couple, to have a baby girl, ‘should have sexual congress 24 hours prior to ovulation’. The ...”

“... the shape of another world.’She also brought the fabric of other worlds into the square. She was keen on embroidered Chinese gowns and Paris frocks: ‘I certainly feel there is something radically wrong with my clothes from an academic point of view.’ Shuddering away from the ‘cabbage wallpaper and horsehair sofas’ of her Victorian relatives, she ...”

“... Sayers tried the same trick in The Documents in the Case, her only crime novel not featuring Lord Peter Wimsey, but it was her least successful book: too many competing voices drowned out the plot. (Van Dine’s 16th rule: ‘A detective novel should contain … no literary dallying with side-issues … They hold up the action and introduce issues irrelevant ...”

“... Row suits, could easily be a real-life counterpart of Dorothy L. Sayers’s fictional sleuth Lord Peter Wimsey. (It’s a nice touch that the affair gets a mention in her 1935 detective novel Gaudy Night. Wimsey himself had clearly been following it keenly.) The dishevelled, corduroy-clad communist Pollard has more than a whiff of Le Carré about him: in one ...”

“... front’.Carey is excellent at sketching biographies, quoting judiciously and generously, and keen to be explanatory without being patronising: you can see in the use of anecdote and analogy the experience of years lecturing to drifting undergraduates. (The Elizabethans fretted about whether or not they were damned, he explains at one point, rather like ...”

“... of caviar are available all year round.‘People are gaining more confidence in sushi,’ said Peter Morrison, Manager, Trading Division. ‘We have joined forces with very credible traders such as Yo! Sushi and we aim to educate customers by bringing them here.’ Alison handed me a cup of liquid grass from the fresh juice bar, Crussh. There was something ...”

“... a book of unrevised lectures called Varieties of Parable and a Collected Poems. Even now, with Peter McDonald’s intelligently re-edited Collected, we do not have all the MacNeice we could ask for. As McDonald points out, a Complete Poems would be considerably larger than the 600-odd pages of verse plus seven appendices of fugitive poems, prefaces and ...”

“... Cup and the Lucina Cup – the press had a heyday celebrating ‘a new type of river girl … keen-eyed and close-shingled’, ‘Miss M.B. Carstairs, foremost motorboat enthusiast in Britain’.These triumphs, though spectacular, were relatively short-lived. In 1928 Carstairs commissioned an exorbitantly expensive speedboat, the Jack Stripes, which she ...”