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“... child? Leaving Carol, my 80-year-old mother and my daughter relatively secure in the cars, my son Richard and I plunged down the hill, going from hut to hut asking for the little girl. Directed ever further down we soon found ourselves accompanied – ‘surrounded’ does more justice to the tenseness of the situation – by a crowd of young men with ...”

“... Company struck again. This time the book was called Innovation and written by a director called Richard Foster. With ‘change’ all around them, successful companies need to know more about innovation and the problem of limits. Here, then, is the story of the S-curve, the theory of the Attacker’s Advantage, and a necessary correction of Peters and ...”

“... with government – over minimum standards for all council housing. And although I see that both Richard Haslam and Jonah Jones credit him with authorship of the splendidly rude, punchy, near-libellous DIA Cautionary Guide to St Alban’s (1929), I am surprised that some credit doesn’t also go to what is surely the echo of that same ...”

“... a lack large enough to incite the putting-down of a book that has put down life. Bellow, quoting Richard Rorty, instances angrily the philosophical ambitions of a distractive culture, its mimicking of philosophical procedures. It seems highly unlikely that Ashbery was at issue here. But it has to be said that his work has achieved a height of estimation by ...”

“... lightly in a corner. I asked what it weighed, and was told: ‘Maybe three pounds.’ The dead weight of the leg, that extra forty pounds, was entirely due to its lack of the normal postural tone one has in even the most passive normal limb. ‘Have a look!’ said the caster. ‘They’ve done a beautiful job there.’ I raised myself on my elbow, and had ...”

“... One definition of a celebrity might be that they are the people required by us to bear the weight of the question: who are we meant to be performing to, or what are we doing when performing to an invisible audience? We should never assume that because one audience is visible, there isn’t an invisible one hidden but present too. Among other ...”

“... with pink eyes To match her shoes, when I mistook the silks; Her head uncrushed by that round weight of hat So strangely similar to the tortoise-shell Which slew the tragic poet.The hyper-pink shepherdess represents the dainty femininity wished on the child by her aunt. The hat, however, suggests to the adult Aurora, by now a poet with an interest in ...”

“... portrait composed of largely asserted values illuminating and convincing: disappointingly, in Richard Schacht’s introduction such an enquiry, which would indeed be timely, is not attempted. The last essay, ‘Wagner in Bayreuth’, is designed as an apotheosis of the Master on the occasion of the first Bayreuth Festival of July 1876. ‘In ...”

“... year in power, Gorbachev was presiding over a full-scale crash, whose causes are well described by Richard Ericson in an essay on the contemporary Russian economy in After the Soviet Union: Perestroika dictated the monetisation of transactions (that is, contractual buying and selling for a profit) without allowing the rouble to become real money or prices to ...”

“... contemporary biographer’ as engaged in a life-and-death struggle – ‘forced, by the mere dead weight of paper, by the mountains of letters and journals and newspapers, to melt his materials or be smothered by them’. By the time the second volume was published in 1962, the reader, too, was potentially imperilled: ‘My task,’ Edel wrote, ‘has been ...”

“... campy romps such as Myra Breckinridge and Duluth, political dramas (The Best Man, An Evening with Richard Nixon), and TV travelogues (Vidal in Venice). With the exception of John Updike, no American novelist of the postwar period has shown as much disinterested devotion to criticism as a regular practice (as opposed to an easy way to keep your name in print ...”

“... I was awake; I was eating more than usual but within three weeks had lost a stone and a half in weight, and couldn’t put it back on for more than a year. Later I developed blurred vision in my right eye, tinnitus in my right ear and recurrent insomnia. More frightening than any of this was the fact that I found it very difficult to concentrate: when I ...”

“... output did better than that of most of the others, and this should surely have had more weight at the post-war take-off point than a growth rate lying further back.’ The argument about the negative effect of the war is disposed of (to Professor Pollard’s satisfaction, at least) by reference to the ‘great strength’ acquired in ‘some of the ...”

“... quite say the animals agreed too. But he does pronounce the perverse verdict that, by 1900, ‘the weight of medical progress had crushed anti-vivisection.’ The depth of his misunderstanding is exposed in his passing remark that the Victorian anti-vivisection campaign was ‘perhaps the last major controversy in which lay people pretended to the competence ...”

“... swans. Women give birth on the stairs. A particular form of lovemaking, the man pressing his weight to the woman’s unresponsive back, recalls the executed youth hauled from the pit. (A long-haired sacrificial male god straight out of The Ballad of Reading Gaol.) Each element is made to vibrate against its contrary. Binding’s narratives, carefully ...”