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“... to find the blue wings of Morpho cypris spread out before one. Then a few pages later there is the green and orange of Ornithoptera paradisea. This is, however, not a work of lepidopterology, except in the sense that it records that the author was ‘born into a family in which lepidopterology was a ruling passion’. Other illustrations suggest other ...”

“... of his knitted navy-blue shorts’, so Dan Jacobson rediscovers his son ‘wearing a green knitted jersey with a stand-up collar and buttons at its neck, and a pair of orange pants of a coarsely woven material that seemed to come no more than about two inches down his thighs’. Again, he is able to reconstitute his English master’s ...”

“... of Foreign Income, or even his wartime career as propagandist, but for The Thirty-Nine Steps and Green-mantle. Exactly a century after John Buchan published his first novel, Sir Quixote of the Moors, he is being read for his ‘shockers’. I have no idea if he’ll be read a century from now but I imagine the first hundred years, like the first hundred ...”

“... he was 45 and she was 25. Cavendish was the daughter of the Duke of Devonshire, a cousin of Lord David Cecil, et cetera, and became a lady-in-waiting to Princess Margaret – the next best thing, perhaps, to Betjeman bagging a royal. His relationship with Cavendish was clearly one of the most important in his life, but the reader is left to infer from ...”

“... historical revolution, this time in the study of ideas. Religion and Public Doctrine, which S.J.D. Green compares to Gibbon in its audacious, subversive sweep, yet also likens to a ‘bilious tour round a retired clergyman’s library’, seemed the antithesis of everything Cowling had stood for as a historian. Instead of setting ideas in a recognisable ...”

“... whose circumscription we may set All solitudes of love, room for love’s face, Love’s projects green with leaves, Love’s monuments like tombstones on our lives. ‘The Broken Bowl’ typifies the meretricious humourlessness of Merrill’s early poetry. The later work has none of this menacing generality, and the paralysing cast of the grand style is ...”

“... XL-Ende Gelände sort – and a globally managed economic transition to social justice and green jobs. Kingsnorth’s piece was tremendously elegant and well-informed, but it left the reader with a worry. If he is right and it’s all too late already – what then?It was for Green New Deal reasons, among ...”

“... about Netanyahu’s predecessors, they had their fascination, from the monastic self-discipline of David Ben-Gurion to the gluttony of Ariel Sharon. Netanyahu comes across as a hollow figure: a ‘marketing man’, in the words of Max Hastings, who met him while writing a biography of his brother Jonathan. Yet Netanyahu can hardly be avoided, or his survival ...”

“... too much John Hoyer Updike. In a 1997 review for the New York Observer, the recently kinged David Foster Wallace diagnosed how far Updike had fallen in the esteem of a younger generation. ‘Penis with a thesaurus’ is the phrase that lives on, though it is not the levelling blow it first appears; one feels oddly proud, after all, of a penis that has ...”

“... back is as dry as the Mojave, ready. Cranston’s comedy is to be a half-step ahead of the beat, David Duchovny’s to be a half-step behind. In a moving car this balances, like when you perfectly pace a moving walkway so it appears to be standing still. In their silences they are talking about ambition, acknowledging strengths and weaknesses, they are ...”

“... by or about the group. Clive Bell went to the Paris exhibitions, there were stories by David Garnett, features on Duncan Grant, and Woolf wrote five pieces, including one about Sir Walter Raleigh. Vogue still owed something to the society magazine that was the earliest incarnation of the American edition, and the first frontispiece went to Eileen ...”

“... rainbow (‘The colour of the dead faces changed from white to yellow-grey, to red, to purple, to green, to black, to slimy’), or like the dead Boche in his gruesome poem of that name:                     he scowled and stunk With clothes and face a sodden ...”

“... of isolation and unease, of hopelessness. The strange democracy of madness is his theme: David Hume and his breakdown, as described to the physician George Cheyne; and from Gilbert White’s Natural History of Selborne, the story of the idiot boy, who spent the summer eating bees, his only earthly occupation. Porter takes his cue from Burton’s ...”

“... But there are immediate difficulties with the book, difficulties of a kind once ascribed by David Lodge to a figure seen at academic conferences: the figure of the Deconstructionist who, radically sceptical about the existence of selfhood, identity and the subject, nonetheless continues to go for an early-morning jog. The jogging Deconstructionist – a ...”

“... As I write this, the Liberal MP David Alton is about to introduce a Bill changing the upper time limit on legal abortions from 28 weeks to 18. If he succeeds, more women will be forced to give birth against their will, and more will be obliged to give birth to children already known to be severely handicapped. Whether he succeeds will be determined by a House of Commons where 13 out of every 16 MPs belong to the sex that does not get pregnant and does not, traditionally, take on the main responsibility of childcare ...”