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“... modern world. I think of Edward’s London lectures on lateness, dazzling meditations on Adorno, Richard Strauss and Visconti. ‘It is as if,’ he said of these figures, ‘having achieved age they want none of its supposed serenity or maturity, or any of its amiability and official ingratiation. Yet in none of them is mortality denied or evaded.’ In ...”

“... it just as forcefully. How could he consistently associate himself with Russophobes such as Richard Pipes, who want us to believe that Russians have authoritarianism stitched into their genetic code? Deep contextual insight is ostensibly what leads Cohen to dismiss foreign blueprints and game plans. Russia should develop ‘an indigenous economic ...”

“... nearest bushes, possessed by ‘a single unmixed instinct of fear for his young and happy life’. Richard Holmes’s impressive and absorbing Firing Line shows how accurately Tolstoy projected, in this episode and others, the psychology of troops in battle. Holmes quotes Lieutenant David Tinker on his first experience, during the Falklands War, of being ...”

“... by a housewife. As a way of clearing her mind, a woman makes use of a weekend when her husband, Richard, is away, to set down on paper what has been happening over the previous months. Stella, a teenager, just out of high school, comes to stay as a guest of the family. Under the eyes of his wife, Richard seduces ...”

“... received in the form of those letters from Dallapiccola or Gould, and all but calculates the human price he might be paying for his extraordinary way of life. If there were any great 20th-century artists, musicians, writers or philosophers with whom Craft, accompanying Stravinsky, did not at some point between 1948 and 1971 break bread (or any distinguished ...”

“... Freud. But it is also because a past is not a thing to be discovered. As the analyst said, and as Richard Rorty has been saying in this journal, it is not discovered but made. Ronald Fraser was not trying to determine, like certain historians of former times, what his past ‘really was’. But there is some question of a pathogenic secret, of the recovery of ...”

“... their ads onto a news website is by striking a direct deal with the site’s publisher, at a fixed price per thousand ‘impressions’ (each time an ad is shown to a viewer counts as one impression). But an advertiser can also buy ad slots, often far more cheaply, in what they call ‘open auctions’ or the ‘open marketplace’. There, demand from multiple ...”

“... the whole interwar period, looks wonderfully haughty and disdainful in his black topper. Sir Richard Hopkins, who headed the Treasury team for most practical purposes in the 1930s before belatedly becoming permanent secretary himself, is caught looking obliquely, intently, thoughtfully – not a man to be underestimated – while his close colleague Sir ...”

“... I suppose because the rasping quality in his voice echoed Auden’s harsh tones. However, because Richard Griffiths was available and indeed anxious to play the part, the role went to him. Emergency casting sessions such as the one Gambon knew we were holding are always mildly hysterical and often very funny as assorted names (often wildly unsuitable) are put ...”

“... of ‘contemporary art’: Nicholas Serota (at the Tate), Charles Saatchi, Sarah Kent (Time Out), Richard Dorment (Daily Telegraph, oddly enough). Against: Modern Painters, Brian Sewell (Evening Standard), Giles Auty (Spectator), Glynn Williams (at the RCA) and any number of Johnsonian or Waugh-like commentators who throw themselves into the breach on wet ...”

“... could no longer be squeezed the Left had nothing to fall back on. Both Wilson Governments paid the price for it: the victors were the neo-liberals who did not need community. How is this paradox to be resolved? Only by what Marquand calls ‘the widest possible diffusion of responsibility and power’, which would give participants ‘a chance to experience ...”

“... He later boasted of his obstinate silence: his ‘judges’ – who included rackmaster Richard Topcliffe – ‘could get nothing of him to all their demands but Aye and No’. He was also plagued by prison informers, ‘two damn’d villains’ who tried to wheedle seditious sentiments out of him. One of these was Robert Poley, the government ...”

“... phenomenon. Although Chamberlain’s return from Munich was televised live (with commentary by Richard Dimbleby), the general consensus in the early days was that television and politics didn’t mix. Thus Sir William Haley, Director-General of the BBC in the late Forties, believed that television was totally unsuited to political discussion. The ...”

“... The anti-Macedonian campaign was a sick affair, for which Greece has rightly paid a heavy price. But by the time of CUP’s change of heart, the campaign was over. CUP were more justified in arguing that their commercial interests might have been damaged by publishing Fields of Wheat, Hills of Blood. When the nationalist agitation was at its fiercest ...”

“... in Oxford had yet to become Oxford philosophy and, in his view (Ryle, perhaps, apart, and H.H. Price), needed a good shaking. Real philosophy was what went on in Cambridge. Ayer read Wittgenstein when hardly anybody else in Oxford thought of doing so. But at Ryle’s suggestion he gave up the idea of sitting at Wittgenstein’s feet in Cambridge and ...”