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“... The registrar​ at Chelsea Town Hall on the King’s Road said that anything I told him would be assumed to be true: a notice on the desk next to his computer monitor explained the dangers of perjuring yourself. Then we began to go through the details of the death certificate. Name: Hugh Swynnerton Thomas. Date of death: 7 May 2017 ...”

“... has reconstructed is only a ‘family romance’, an operetta played out on her own toy stage. And David Lodge’s heroine complains that she is ‘getting dragged into a classic realist text, full of causality and morality. How can I get out of it?’ Trust the contemporary novelist for that, we might think – though, for Lodge’s characters, it’s a close ...”

“... and president of the New America Foundation, tweeted that it was the ‘right thing’ to do. ‘It will not stop the war nor save the Syrian people from many other horrors,’ Slaughter conceded, and ‘it is illegal under international law.’ But ‘it at least draws a line somewhere & says enough.’ ‘The deterioration of the ...”

“... squandered his lead over Nixon in the race for the Republican nomination in 1968 by saying he’d been ‘brainwashed’ by generals who told him the Vietnam War could be won. Last month his son Mitt arrived in Tampa persecuted for being a millionaire 250 times over, accused of sacrificing American workers on the altar of his own wealth, his status as a ...”

“... that far country through study and then begin to remember it as their own birthplace. Others, like David Donald and Jeffrey Hart, remember it first and then study it up in order to flesh out their memories with circumstantial detail. In either case, historiography is given the task that Wordsworth assigned to poetry: to reconcile the seemingly unrelated worlds ...”

“... rather than a newspaperman. In his introduction to the new edition of A Child of the Century, David Denby compares him with Arthur Sullivan, who wanted to be the English Schumann and wrote many now forgotten symphonic works, while everyone remembers Patience and HMS Pinafore. Hecht didn’t become a great novelist or playwright, but he found that he ...”

“... as Purdy tells his former friend: ‘You’re a fucking loser, Milo, and it’s got nothing to do with the fact that you didn’t win.’ Meritocracy turns out to be a rigged game, especially when one player inherited an advantage and the other never really bothered to roll the dice. Lipsyte, now 51 years old, graduated from Brown at a time when theory ...”

“... Michael Gove; Suella Braverman, who proclaimed in her keynote address that ‘white people do not exist in a special state of sin or collective guilt’; Jacob Rees-Mogg, who railed against the state of a country his party has ruled for thirteen years; the backbench MP Miriam Cates, who blamed ‘cultural Marxism’ for declining birth rates. Before ...”

“... little shit’. Even for a headstrong young man it was a remarkably courageous thing to do. Macmillan never forgot it. Profumo then proceeded to enjoy a notably good war, serving first as an air intelligence liaison officer during the Battle of Britain, before seeing action in the battle of Tunis, the invasion of Sicily and the conquest of Italy. In ...”

“... and in some cases paid friends and lovers, of whom there were legions, to donate letters they’d received from him to the Olin archive. Hammer mines this trove with tireless ardour. Merrill’s 2001 Collected Poems is much the same length as the biography, at 885 pages. A companion volume, The Changing Light at Sandover, which comprises three books and a ...”

“... He grew up in Leicestershire and had lived in various places but it was Suffolk, where he’d spent childhood holidays, that he really loved.He had wanted to raise his son there, to work from home, be ‘supported by the landscape’ and go on long walks: he didn’t write much about walks or landscapes, but he did once mention how much he distrusted ...”

“... on global supply chains, there isn’t all that much the Bank of England or anyone else can do about it. Raising interest rates acts as a signal that the bank still takes its responsibilities seriously (it does, after all, have an official mandate to pursue an inflation target of 2 per cent), but while interest rate rises may have the effect of ...”

“... on Italy’s Balkan periphery overlooked by the watchtowers of communist Yugoslavia, where he’d been appointed director of the municipal asylum. Here the term – manicomio in Italian – was less controversial. Italy had had no equivalent of the 1930 Mental Treatment Act, and the legislation of 1904 that governed such institutions in Italy conceived them ...”

“... nigglers could write irresistible ‘page-turners’ and make their fortunes, why did they not do so? It is a fair guess this edgy Scot would have despised current television programmes about books, concluding (as many other have already concluded) that these are designed to put the masses off reading. It was MacLean’s good fortune to start writing when ...”

“... work, are missing: no jockeys, few portraits, no brothels, no street and café scenes, no music-hall singers. Landscapes, more of them than you might expect from a painter who was so scornful of the genre (and some of them in curiously lurid before-the-storm-colours), share the simplified outlines and generalised forms which distinguish the pictures of ...”