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“... recovered. ‘I am favourably impressed with General Wavell in many ways,’ Churchill wrote to Anthony Eden, ‘but I do not feel in him that sense of mental vigour and resolve to overcome obstacles, which is indispensable to successful war.’ John Colville, Churchill’s secretary, recorded that ‘Churchill tried his hardest to elicit the general’s ...”

“... an admirer of German Romanticism and 17th-century painting, a reimaginer of such figures as Anthony Blunt and Paul de Man, and a frequent raider of mathematics and cosmology, Banville is – no question – one of the fancy boys, sometimes verging on being a clever-clever darling. (‘As one of your most darkly glowing luminants has observed’ is the ...”

“... continuity: ‘A biography of Ho Chi Minh.’ Did I read French? No. Vietnamese? No. ‘Well,’ Anthony Blond said thoughtfully, ‘you better start a crash course in French straight away and now let’s go back to my office and send Ho a telegram.’ We did. A month later there was an excited call from Blond. ‘Come to the office immediately. A ...”

“... it in a movie? Almost all the big stars lived in choicer parts of the city, in Beverly Hills or West LA, the canyons or Pacific Palisades. But in the decade of his major work, starting in 1947, Ryan kept a certain distance from the rest. And he was unusual in other ways: during the McCarthy years, together with his wife, Jessica, he founded a progressive ...”

“... In 1989, an earthquake in Tipasa, just west of Algiers, left thousands of people homeless. Three years later, another shook the densely packed outskirts of Cairo. In both cases, the state’s response was no better than it might have been in any developing country with high population concentrations and feeble services ...”

“... English it felt as if one smelled. To Tony Blair, though, it is of roses. Note how in the south-west even the humblest hamlet nowadays seems to boast a business park. 12 May, Long Crichel. Driving through rain-soaked Dorset we stop at Puddletown and the church there which is full of fixtures and character: a chantry chapel with alabaster tombs and the ...”

“... really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness.’ McCarthyism had been launched in Wheeling, West Virginia only four years earlier, in the speech where the senator claimed to have the names of 205 Communists employed by the State Department. No one then could have predicted his hold would break so soon. Yet the time of the fear lasted longer than the ...”

“... for nomination as their prospective candidate. Though they knew he had done well in the recent West Birmingham by-election, they may still have had a few qualms when they saw their man in the flesh. A photograph reproduced in Tam Dalyell’s peculiar but highly entertaining memoir of Crossman gives some idea of what he might have looked like. It shows the ...”

“... too, in the beautifully produced, unostentatious separate recent collections by Douglas Oliver and Anthony Barnett,* contributors to the Carcanet volume. ‘America’ is one acknowledged influence on these poets, though ‘America’ turns out to mean chiefly Ashbery, Olson and Pound. That there are other traditions to look to these days is clear from the ...”

“... first was Politics and Letters (1979), a big book of specific questions posed by Perry Anderson, Anthony Barnett and Francis Mulhern, members of the editorial committee of New Left Review; and of answers, rarely as specific or pointed, offered by Williams. The second section of Politics and Letters includes detailed criticism of The Long Revolution and ...”

“... artists (Bell, Cohen, Knight) or authors (Allingham, Blyton, Compton-Burnett, Sackville-West and Sitwell), topped off with occasional politicians (Astor, Bonham Carter and Lady Lloyd-George) and royals (Princess Marina, Queen Victoria Eugénie, the Princess Royal). Vera Brittain, Ivy Williams (‘the first woman to be called to the English ...”

“... Porter; to John Cage’s poetry, Ezra Pound’s operas, the compositions of Christopher Fry or Anthony Burgess.) One of the aims of her study is to rescue Gurney’s later work from accusations of madness, and offer it as evidence of his experimental, even modernist, spirit.As a teenager, Gurney was a chorister at Gloucester Cathedral: his father was a ...”

“... white blouse and pencil skirt: zakuski, borsch and dumplings. Our hosts were the lawyer and writer Anthony Julius, who said enigmatically that he had ‘committed himself’ to Dau, and one of the project’s producers, Susanne Marian. Khrzhanovsky wasn’t there; and although Julius had offered to arrange viewing of footage from the work in progress, it ...”

“... in its perspectives. We who are the heirs to the civilisations of Europe, the Mediterranean, West Asia and North America, have tamed and trammelled that abundance. The subtitle makes the point: ‘Abstraction versus the Richness of Being’. Since Richness of Being sounds like a Good Thing, we infer that Feyerabend thought Abstraction a Bad ...”

“... or ‘respectable’ in the manner of Nunn May’s Birmingham brass-founding origins, or of the West German Salomons and Eichengrüns who supported Hilde, child of a Jewish-Catholic marriage, on her way out of a deeply disturbed and dysfunctional family setting. Berti’s mother had been a reasonably successful Viennese actress until her marriage, his uncle ...”