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“... me. ‘And, frankly, does anyone in Paris still care? As for the Africans, the majority are very young. For them, France is just another foreign country, when it’s not a convenient scapegoat for their many woes.’ Bourgi’s Françafrique, by tacit admission, is a Potemkin village. A general I spoke to recently in Paris – a figure whose long history of ...”

“... Another student also observed, again to Gregory, that ‘in China, the old do not like the young.’ Too sweeping, no doubt, but worth a moment’s reflection. Most of the time, though, the reader is kept firmly in Touristland – as were the authors by Mr Lin, their kindly but masterful guide. To make up for this, Spender works a trifle too hard at ...”

“... the 7-1 outsider and the only first novel on the list – is narrated by Dolores Gauci, a young girl whose Maltese father gambled away his Cardiff café on the day she was born. Frank Gauci is a weak, compulsive man who ignores the difficulties of his family and hides behind the pages of the Sporting Life. Azzopardi has a keen sense of the shame of ...”

“... a great deal of contrasting art photography – by Luc Delahaye, Agata Madejska, Simon Norfolk, Stephen Shore, Shomei Tomatsu, Jane and Louise Wilson and many others – in skilful juxtaposition.) McCullin reappears later in the show, this time photographing in Berlin in 1961 as the Wall is erected: curious US troops peer over the new barrier. This sequence ...”

“... reliable sources. Goldberg is also a passionate supporter of Israel: he went to live there as a young man, served with the IDF in the Occupied Territories, and writes a blog for the Atlantic that has made him an influential figure in American Zionist circles. One would never guess from his piece that, despite its support for militants in Palestine and ...”

“... al-Jazeera devoted an hour to discussing the conference. The conclusions of John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt were confirmed. On the eve of Mearsheimer and Walt’s visit to Israel the Israel lobby stood at the centre of political life in the US and the world at large. Why do candidates for the American presidency believe that the support of the Israel lobby ...”

“... accompanying podcast series covers plant intelligence, the Amazon pharmacopeia and ecologist Stephen Harding’s concept of ‘Gaia alchemy’, which seeks to access the intelligence of the earth through meditation and shamanic ritual. To address the climate disaster, Harding urges, we first have to heal the split between science and rationality. One of ...”

“... however, could well be part of Pinckney’s strategy. For his book is all about the attempt of a young black man to define himself, not according to roots or background, but as an autonomous agent on the stateless terrain of the free-floating émigré intellectual. High Cotton is Darryl Pinckney’s first novel, and it is obviously a book which has taken ...”

“... least one of his evenings would be recorded. He said he had kept a diary himself for a while when young, but it seemed to be heavy in pensées and complaint. It was cool on George’s terrace, four storeys up, looking out over Trastevere. He was quick to refill our drinks. I smoked a cigar. Candace was pretty in her yellow dress. Gore talked, imitated, made ...”

“... Mann wrote this engaging novella in a few weeks in 1943. (The new translation by Marion Faber and Stephen Lehmann, which is brisk and direct, is a welcome replacement of the fussier and less accurate English version done by Helen Lowe-Porter for the original publication.) The novella was written after Mann helped pitch a film on the Ten Commandments to ...”

“... standard life, by Conyers Read, is in two volumes (published in 1955 and 1960), each larger than Stephen Alford’s new book. Alford, the author of The Early Elizabethan Polity: William Cecil and the British Succession Crisis (1998), has chosen to focus his study on the controversial subject of the Queen of Scots. Mary Stuart always claimed she was the ...”

“... fluency and suggestiveness. Only a few hours elapse in the narrative. Nathan Zuckerman, the young author of some well-received short stories, spends an evening, night and morning at the New England home of a reclusive elder writer he esteems, E.I. Lonoff. The dates and other details of Nathan’s career tally with Roth’s own. Lonoff’s speciality has ...”

“... to the Utilitarians or the Pre-Raphaelites, both of which, in fact, had direct links with the Stephen family. Williams contrasted the Bloomsbury Group with the Godwin circle of the 1780s and 1790s, which he saw as a genuinely oppositional group, whose ‘rational and civilising proposals’ were ‘met by the crudest kind of ...”

“... appear more decorative than radical. The shock of the new is hard to feel at a distance, but as Stephen Walsh observes, we expect the music of the modernist generation, of whom Debussy was the first, to be difficult, abstruse, even rebarbative. The works of Schoenberg, Webern, Stravinsky and Bartók continue to present us with a residue of toughness. By ...”

“... of Aquarium, is how a newly-promoted Soviet general, with his own clientage to create, recruits a young protégé to Soviet military intelligence. GRU, the Chief Directorate of Intelligence of the Soviet General Staff, is an entirely different matter from the KGB, the secret police whose presence in the Soviet Union is ubiquitous and which would-be recruits ...”