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“... church, but I would still be I, Richard Verey, 35 years old, an Englishman of the upper middle class’; or, now, Richard Fisher, historian, writer and observer by temperament, drawn into the dirty world of action at the crisis of the Cold War, in divided Germany in 1983. If knowledge is one way of testing the limits of ...”

“... December last year between the President of the country and the RUF leader, and the five-year-old war was ended. If this accord continues to hold, as at present, it will be because ‘the system’ of utterly corrupt ‘clientage’, or ‘patrimonialism’ in Richards’s preferred usage, will have ceased to wield an all-compelling power and will have given ...”

“... wings to fly. Although the record is treacherous, it will be endlessly quarried for examples of class attitudes, popular prejudices, sexual mores, ghastly manners, period slang (blissikins, blissipots), evidence of anti-semitism, sidelights on the servant problem, glimpses of the literary underworld and aspects of life under the Attlee Terror. Even in its ...”

“... would be required by our moral guardians. W.H. Smith have sections devoted to Horror, Romance, War, Teen Fiction and Science Fiction – but Westerns, as the cowpoke would put it, are scarcer than hen’s teeth. Cultural prejudice against the genre extends to the medium which it has made peculiarly its own. It has been reckoned that 90 per cent of American ...”

“... sense of foreboding as that of, say, some prescient European at the outset of the Hundred Years War. For four years, Lamb was the Los Angeles Times Africa correspondent. He visited all the countries he writes about and talked with many heads of state. His nationality allows him a certain objectivity about the various post-colonial legacies he ...”

“... Walker’s book on Garbo: they depend far less upon books of film history than upon first-class and first-hand research. Instead of a furtive glance at Terry Ramsaye’s A Million and One Nights, everyone’s favourite source book, these authors have tracked down studio files, personal letters and unpublished scenarios. And all of them accept their ...”

“... but fewer standards. And in a bleaker world, an altered Britain seemed to count for less. Post-war visions of global unity faded; the Commonwealth was no power base. Dwarfed by the super-powers, impoverished, deeply afraid of the bomb, the country seemed less and less capable of taking care of itself. No wonder that some people sought refuge – in ...”

“... self-pity, any rhetorical elaboration). As a pitilessly unsensational chronicle of what a working-class childhood could be in the England of the 1920s, it is irreplaceable. But is it in any real sense poetry? And from where I stand I have to judge that it isn’t, because all its devices of language are quite plainly instrumental: they serve, and they ...”

“... passed to the collective ownership and pleasure of the Politburo, more recently to become a high-class sanatorium. In one of the outbuildings, a billboard spells out the stern order of Soviet collective leisure: the times at which to present oneself for dinner, to vacate one’s room, to set off for the beach. Today, it is the headquarters of the Georgian ...”

“... Birds, which the ornithologist and publisher H. F. Witherby conceived just before the First World War, brought out in the Twenties, and replaced in the Thirties with a five-volume Handbook, the emphasis was on Plumages, Bare Parts, Moults, Measurements, Weights, Structure and Geographical Variation. Witherby’s stylish volumes marked the transition from ...”

“... male gazers. In his Introduction, Kureishi writes that the intersection of pop ‘with issues of class, race and particularly gender has been at the centre of post-war culture’. But The Faber Book of Pop only seems interested in gender insofar as the blurring of traditional distinctions which pop has encouraged has ...”

“... there is a joke here somewhere, though one almost certain to be missed.The members of the educated class, lamenting the loss of territories, markets, ports, transportation and other key assets after China’s defeat in the Opium Wars, moved to modernise the state. Mastering telecommunications, at a time when the rapid transmission of information was remaking ...”

“... fiction: end-time resource wars on a dying planet. The Uninhabitable Earth is an example of the class of writing the eco-philosopher Timothy Morton has described as ‘ecological information data dump’: quantities of frightening and confusing information, mostly out of date by the time of publication, ‘shaking your lapels while yelling disturbing ...”

“... of Northern Ireland, the part of the province that voted Leave. Banners commemorated First World War battles and the UVF, which was formed in 1912 to resist Home Rule. One had the slogan ‘prepared for peace, ready for war’, the words of a mural in an area of Belfast dominated by the reincarnated UVF during the ...”

“... a stop to this; and neither could their parents or anybody else. This was in the solidly middle-class south County Dublin suburbs in the early 1960s, now regarded as the dawn of a less insular Ireland – a time and a place of which one might have expected better. Hamilton is too resourceful and alert a writer to make his memoir yet one more book about a ...”