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“... while ‘Watt was “nearly” taken in London, I forget by whom’ (a footnote informs us that Herbert Read at Routledge read the novel with ‘considerable bewilderment’ and found it ‘wild and unintelligible’). Having been through the same interminable round of rejections with Murphy in the 1930s, Beckett seems resigned to disappointment and even ...”

“... quite sufficient to produce shock or even death.’ Defence lawyers and their experts disagreed. Herbert Page, a railway company surgeon, argued that people who suffered railway spine had somehow allowed themselves to be overcome by fear; they developed symptoms that mimicked real diseases as if they had submitted themselves to hypnosis. This strange state ...”

“... the Republican Party claiming mass popular support because much of the map is coloured red, no matter how sparsely populated the area in question. The usefulness of calling the Comanche an empire becomes less clear when one considers that at the height of their power they numbered forty thousand people – the population at the time of Cincinnati.At times ...”

“... gaily across the water: “Now we know where we are! No more bloody allies!”’ The writer A.P. Herbert recorded that. And it was briefly a widespread feeling in England in the summer of 1940. Belgium gone, Holland, now France … horror and pity, but also a sort of relief. And if the UK really does barge out of the European Union this Halloween, many ...”

“... hyperbolic but ultimately enigmatic figure, and not the least enigmatic thing about him is the matter of his death. In early 1917 he left Europe for the United States, on the run from the draft: ‘On ne me fait pas marcher, moi!’ There he continued to sow scandal, notably when arrested for indecent exposure at the opening of an exhibition by the ...”

“... rather, we know what to call the way it will be funded, the PPP. Understanding it is a different matter. In 1978, the Jam released a single called ‘Down in the Tube Station at Midnight’. It opens with the sound of a Tube train pulling into a station. A child’s voice cries against the heavy roar and rattle and a guard shouts something and the music ...”

“... or Twitter for all of thirty seconds while you look at it. Actually visiting the thing is another matter, and at least two of the books that use the image are written (or rather, compiled) by people who haven’t. If they had, they might have noticed that the building is as pedestrian-unfriendly as it is photogenic – the only easy way to see it as a whole ...”

“... across South African campuses in 2015, Mbembe said that he often returned to a 1969 debate between Herbert Marcuse and Theodor Adorno to reflect on the way intellectuals might ‘bear witness to the main events of [our] time’. As public discontent with post-apartheid South Africa spilled over from the townships into the universities, some faculty were ...”

“... more adaptable than this five-syllable shot at classification, which the reformer had to deal in matter of factly while to his opponents it had the savour of a slippery exemption from censure. ‘Queer’, of course, has now come full circle, or is on its second lap: in Parker’s subtitle it has a narrower sense than its present-day usage, which embraces ...”

“... the arrangements for Mam’s transfer the next day and we say goodnight. ‘Did those questions matter?’ asks Dad. ‘Would they affect the treatment?’ I tell him that I don’t think so and that what Mr Parr was after, presumably, was whether there had been anything similar in the family before. I start the car. ‘Only it was your Grandad Peel. He ...”

“... I never smelt a smelt like that smelt smelt. Leonard (Chico), Adolph (Harpo), Julius (Groucho), Herbert (Zeppo) and Milton (Gummo): Groucho was a middle child, if you want to make anything of it. He was the first to succeed, at the age of 15, with a vestigial talent for singing, but a miasma of rotten luck trailed his early efforts. When he went on the road ...”

“... straight thing was ever made.” ’In 1969, he came upon a piece of moral idiocy from Herbert Marcuse – or at any rate a piece of moral idiocy from Marcuse quoted in Encounter – and went into a towering rage, writing that people like Marcuse and indeed Hannah Arendt were products of:the terrible twisted Mitteleuropa in which nothing is ...”

“... of character, Powell unquestionably ranks far above Proust. How much does such an advantage matter? Novels that scant or defy plot have a long and distinguished history – Sterne in the 18th century, Goncharov in the 19th, Rilke in the early 20th, dozens thereafter. Starting later, effectively in the interwar period, major work dispensing with ...”

“... of authority. When it has been in power, the pattern has always been a diarchy – Brandt and Herbert Wehner, or Schmidt and Brandt – with the Chancellor flanked by a powerful and independent Party Chairman, not to speak of the regional prime ministers. Schröder, catapulted within six months of winning a provincial election in Hanover to leadership of ...”

“... person who experiences greatness must have a feeling for the myth he is in,’ Frank Herbert wrote in Dune, Wright’s favourite novel as a teenager. ‘Dune was really about people,’ Wright told me. ‘It was about the idea that we don’t want to leave things to machines and [should instead] develop as humans. But I see things a little ...”