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“... argument becomes too obvious for comfort. The formation and function of canons was the subject of Frank Kermode’s Wellek Library lectures, now published as Forms of Attention. The third and concluding lecture is called ‘Disentangling Knowledge from Opinion’. Kermode’s elegant traditionalism allows him to acknowledge the difficulty of distinguishing ...”

“... Segre’s Storia di un Ebreo Fortunato, Memoirs of a Fortunate Jew, has complex resonances. If, as Frank Kermode has recently remarked in this paper, memoirs and confessions are still to some extent separate genres, then it may be said that a conviction of his own good fortune is the distinguishing mark of the memoirist. The memoirs of famous sportsmen, actors ...”

“... what is it for? Why spend billions of euros to smash subatomic particles together? The physicist Frank Wilczek (a colleague of mine at MIT, though we haven’t worked together directly) shared the 2004 Nobel Prize for his contribution to the reigning theory of high-energy physics; his new book gives non-specialist readers a tour of the conceptual ...”

“... space it requires and seems completely at home – as no work ever could in the gallery built by Frank Lloyd Wright for Uncle Solomon’s foundation in New York. After Guggenheim left New York, artists, including several whom she had supported, began to make huge paintings. She did something to encourage this by commissioning a very large Pollock, and the ...”

“... in the Cold War landscape’ as MacMillan claims, but it was hardly the ‘serious and frank exchange of views on Sino-US relations and world affairs’ that would be claimed in the Shanghai Communiqué signed by Nixon and Zhou at the end of the visit. Indeed, its main coinage consisted of banalities tossed like untethered grappling irons between a ...”

“... Darwin to Nietzsche – Marcus was an intellectual hero. Even Bill Clinton claimed (according to Frank McLynn in his new biography) ‘to have read and reread’ the Meditations during his presidency. For most people now, Marcus Aurelius is remembered as the elderly emperor smothered by young Commodus on campaign on the German frontier at the start of the ...”

“... so nice that he’ll always be someone’s boyfriend, so bland that he’ll always be jilted; Frank, the son who leaves his father, the cop who leaves the force, and the man who first leaves Larkin; Blue, the hustler everybody wants who becomes a travelling Aids activist and so earns a place in heaven somewhere between the Archangel Gabriel and Johnny ...”

“... the end of it I had just about lost touch with everyone. Having made paintings which were as close to being edgeless as he could make them, he set about trying to deal with space itself. It was not a question of looking at an object in space, but of becoming aware of a place – a special one, with particular significance. The artist’s role would, in ...”

“... than something to be envied; in the heyday of ‘lean quarterlies and swarthy periodicals’ (Frank O’Hara), the New Yorker was not viewed as a particularly serious publisher of poetry. Appearing there did nothing to contradict Bishop’s self-stylisation as a ‘poet by default’: ‘I’ve always felt that I’ve written poetry more by not writing it ...”

“... president of the European Central Bank’, as Fortune put it, when she said ‘we are not here to close spreads,’ implying the ECB wouldn’t buy Italian government debt. It had the opposite effect from the statement her predecessor, Mario Draghi, made during the financial crisis eight years ago, when he promised the ECB would do ‘whatever it takes’ to ...”

“... girl-on-girl: ‘All three young women at the table watched Ava move towards the bar. Let’s be frank: Ava was wearing boot-cut jeans that afternoon and all three scrutinised and evaluated her arse as she went. Manda was looking for some avenue of criticism; but it was pretty clear there was absolutely none.’ This blokeish ‘frankness’ is also evident ...”

“... them. I hope you and the kids are keeping well I will be here for some time yet. I will draw to a close sending you and the kids my best love. Michael A thin strip of darkness, the U-boat U.99, commanded by the notorious Kretschmer, cut through the waters off Ireland soon after the last light had gone. It was joined by three other subs, part of the ...”

“... Britain OM, ‘Baron Britain of Aldeburgh’, whose Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra was as close to state music as a piece not actually the national anthem could be, and which cleverly merged spiky modern fugue with a stately theme from Purcell himself. In the same way, his many songs and adapted folk songs sounded a bit old and a bit new, or a bit ...”

“... of deep archival work. Toiling through mouldy reams of municipal Latin, poring over act books and close rolls, pleas and recognizances, baptisms and burials, borough-mote surveys and consistorial court proceedings, scholars like Urry provide a constant supply of rich contextual trivia, and just occasionally, down some documentary back-way, they stumble upon ...”

“... ever since. I used to see Worsthorne around the place, most usually in El Vino’s either at the close of Fleet Street’s daily business or (much more important to the ethos of the joint) about halfway through it. Here is where he had chummed up with Henry Fairlie, Paul Johnson, George Gale, Kingsley Amis and many of his other life-long boon ...”