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“... even by the local standards, quite a lot’s been going on. Scarpia, early identified as a first-class stinker, lusts for Tosca, whose lover he arranges to have tortured, audibly, off stage. He then proposes to Tosca the classic operatic quid pro quo: the tenor’s life for the soprano’s favours. Tosca is unclear what to do about this, so she interrupts ...”

“... ensured his place in popular culture. Although of the generation that grew up during World War Two, he anticipated the flower children of the postwar baby boom, and they were mostly responsible for his mass-market appeal as they engorged anthropology courses in the 1960s and 1970s. He did not, however, consciously seek out any particular audience: he ...”

“... he never read, so far as I know). During my second year at the University of Chicago, I found a class being taught by Wayne Booth. Booth, the author of The Rhetoric of Fiction and The Company We Keep, was one of the more famous members of the English department, and was known to be a good teacher, too. He was also a lapsed Mormon, born in 1921 in the town ...”

“... political anecdote – taken from Thirlwell’s reading, since he didn’t have Kundera’s Cold War experience – as a way of reflecting on his characters and their behaviour. The voice is friendly yet domineering. No sooner is a character or event introduced than the writer steps forward to control the reader’s response: ‘I think you are going to like ...”

“... in style and intent than some entire careers. Though it presents itself as an American Civil War picaresque (the opening line is: ‘Thomas Jefferson Woodhull was 11 years old when he ran away from home to join the Union army’), it gradually turns into a sort of steampunk horror story, featuring the reanimation of corpses and characters with names like ...”

“... Stephen Spender was a visitor to the city of Hamburg both before the war and after, when he played a part in the work of occupation and recovery. He was well on his way to being the noted ex-communist poet, whose lyricism of the left spoke up in praise of pylons and the landing aeroplane, gliding over the suburbs, ‘more beautiful and soft than any moth ...”

“... if he had others to support, while the employee at $50,000 has a certain level of middle-class comfort. More significant, the potentate at 10,000 or 12,000 scudi a year paid no taxes or death duties and was far less bound by laws of bankruptcy, not to mention modern conventions of fiscal probity. It is hard to imagine any free-spending billionaire of ...”

“... with Milton’s Lycidas. The history it tells, of Cavaliers and Roundheads, of the Civil War battles of Naseby and Edgehill, as recalled by the family gardener who ‘skipt’d about the Bon-fire like a boy’ when the anniversaries came round, is that of the religio-political crisis of the mid-17th century in which ‘John Milton, Englishman’ was ...”

“... of what you went there to do. Copying isn’t only a way out of a problem. Teaching an art class at St Anselm’s, Yuan wants the girls to draw lobsters. Olivia Travers’s lobster has ‘very short antennae, a cluster of them streaming back behind each eye’. ‘The antennae must move forward,’ Yuan tells her: ‘The lobster uses them to make his ...”

“... majority stalemate founded on archaism in both state and civil society, like the grotesque social-class rigidities evolved in England to compensate for the slowing down and paralysis of democratic nationality. As the intolerable structure has broken down since the Second World War, peripheral discontent has grown and taken ...”

“... similar document. His 5000-word ‘Democracy in the Middle East’ was written at the US Army War College. Both essays are filled with the kind of breezy generalisations that can still be heard over the clink of whisky glasses in army officers’ mess rooms in the developing world. ‘Our people are mostly uneducated and our politicians not so ...”

“... on the left. At the time of publication, France had entered the fourth year of an undeclared war against nationalist insurgents in Algeria; it had lost its imperial foothold in Indochina in 1954 and was now determined to hang on to its possessions in Africa. Most French critics of colonial rule focused on land expropriation, the exploitation of ...”

“... in their ‘Labourer’ trilogy (1911-19), painted a dark picture of the way a rapacious ruling class had deployed the supposed findings of political economy to legitimate the various schemes of expropriation and exploitation that brought untold suffering to the poor.Another historical line of attack was taken by R.H. Tawney, whose Religion and the Rise of ...”

“... the surrounding hills. Ali’s family was among them. His father opened a smoke shop in a working-class neighbourhood, and Ali attended one of the newly built schools. These were like shrines to Hafez: there were posters of the president on the walls and the pupils memorised his speeches. ‘Our leader for ever: Hafez al-Assad,’ Ali and his classmates ...”

“... to a reporter while on his way to deliver the speech; John Profumo in 1963 as secretary for war for lying about his affair with Christine Keeler; and Amber Rudd as home secretary in 2018 during the Windrush scandal for claiming to be ignorant of the government’s immigration targets, although the figures had been sent to her. In Dalton’s case, it was ...”