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“... millennia of ebullient trading and a century of, to put it mildly, muddled planning, Sheppard and Michael Hebbert paint their pictures in the same bright colours: of a healthy, wealthy conurbation, unfathomable, inchoate, yet liveable and boundlessly energetic. London confers prosperity on the rest of Britain rather than drains it away, they say. It is ...”

“... there is no greater ambition than to live and die in Santa Monica. ‘If I ever get the choice,’ Michael Moorcock declares, ‘that’s where I would cheerfully end my days.’ This is simply the most recent turn in what has proved to be one of the greatest tragic-comic intercontinental love stories of all time. Not too long ago lucred Yankee cognoscenti ...”

“... him).Brando was right, judging by the 2004 movie version of The Merchant of Venice, directed by Michael Radford. The film itself is a pedestrian and pretty adaptation that can’t quite decide where it stands on the antisemitism of the main characters, but Pacino is an excellent Shylock, emphasising the character’s furious dignity in the face of ...”

“... Admiral Horthy to Szalasi in Hungary and Marshal Antonescu to the Legion of the Archangel Michael in Romania. Vidkun Quisling, the Norwegian pro-Nazi whose name became a synonym for collaborationism, was excluded from power for most of the first 22 months of German occupation. Hitler sensibly preferred to rule through influential local notables rather ...”

“... I wrote for the Guardian that night described him as the Labour Party’s would-be philosopher king. What I did not register was that Benn’s lecture that night marked the public beginning of a long intellectual journey. It eventually transformed him from a fairly orthodox left-of-centre Labourite to the front man for a form of radical socialism which few ...”

“... a ditch as having fallen off a log. In either case the suicide’s property will be saved from the King. We can, Murray says, sometimes catch suicide ‘in the act of running away’. The juicier stories come from France, like that of Philippe Testard, a mad merchant who kept giving his money away and once, at the elevation of the Host in the Mass, lifted up ...”

“... to honour as the play proceeded. As Dodsworth writes of the fight at the end, ‘an almost-King, an almost-reconciliation and an almost-duel naturally conspire together to produce “accidental judgments, casual slaughters”.’ The trouble is, as with some 19th-century reactions to the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, reading Hamlet Closely Observed ...”

“... a moral purpose (and cheerfully confesses to a preference for Nahum Tate’s happy ending to King Lear), Malone, however superior as a textual scholar, is scarcely a Shakespearean critic at all. He is content to use authentic historical documents to illuminate Shakespeare, and vice versa, but practically silent on the value or use of both. His criticism ...”

“... du Barry, similarly, Negri twice has a man blindfolded; she dresses in men’s clothes and has the king acting as a lady’s maid. In Die Bergkatze, when she wants to gain the hero’s attention, she chucks a snowball at him. She’s always running, darting around the possibly parodic Expressionist-style sets, racing up and down the staircases. Matching her ...”

“... of papers sold to the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas. And now, here’s The Pale King, this book-shaped version of the ‘long thing’, assembled by Michael Pietsch, Wallace’s editor on Infinite Jest, from ‘a neat stack of manuscript, 12 chapters totalling nearly 250 pages’ discovered by Wallace’s ...”

“... but to the world.’ Equally compelling is the account of what Shakespeare does with Seneca in King Lear – to all appearances the least conventionally Senecan of the tragedies. Having demonstrated how closely Lear’s furious ‘I will do such things’ paraphrases Atreus in Thyestes, Burrow goes on to argue that the whole play can be understood as the ...”

“... The writing is genuinely alive with what Connolly called ‘erotic nostalgia’. Both Powell and Michael Shelden emphasise his capacity for self-inspection, elevated to a comic art, on the subject of his own tastes and weaknesses (‘MESSAGE FROM THE ID: “If you would collect women instead of books I think I could help you” ’), and the acceptance of a ...”

“... the Party could make to the pure monarchical model, for there was no doubt that the leader, like a king, was not responsible to his subjects. Their duty was to follow him but he had no duty to represent them. What no one could forget was the war leadership of Pitt, Lloyd George and Churchill when the fate of the country hung entirely on the character of the ...”

“... high-faggot style’, or did it originate, as John Edgar Wideman claimed, from a mixture of the King James Bible and African American speech? Was it full of the clarity, eloquence and intelligence that Chinua Achebe suggested? And was Baldwin’s involvement with the Civil Rights Movement a cautionary tale for other writers, as Hilton Als insisted, or one ...”

“... detailed account. The oddness and formality of the writing make it feel like a translation, but Michael Hulse works very closely with Sebald in transforming the original German into English. I suspect that the translation from the German is remarkably good. It is as if the reader, too, is in exile, not permitted to wallow in easy, casual prose. Exile looms ...”