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“... are inspiring neighbours to slit each others’ throats.12 March. Reading P. Ackroyd’s Thomas More, which I finish today, leaves me in two minds, the tolerance and scepticism of the author of Utopia and the dogmatism and heresy-hunting of the lawyer never adding up and not short of hypocrisy. It’s hard not to feel there is something specifically ...”

“... decision for apparent bias, but that it was the four judicial conservatives, Roberts, Scalia, Thomas and Alito, who voted to uphold the judgment. They may also now know that, thanks to a subsequent Supreme Court ruling, Massey need no longer channel its subventions through its chairman: it can donate to judicial re-election campaigns corporately and ...”

“... how to read the poems. One anecdote that Parker does not pass on to us concerns a meeting with Frank Harris, in which Housman took offence at Harris’s suggestion that the final stanza of ‘1887’, the introductory poem of A Shropshire Lad, was darkly intended. The poem remembers the Silver Jubilee celebrations, and Housman tests an ossified ...”

“... instead David Lynch, Jonathan Franzen, David Foster Wallace, Marcel Duchamp, William Burroughs, Frank O’Hara, Hugo Ball, Geoff Dyer, Kafka, Samuel Beckett, Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, Muhammad Ali, Joe Louis.Lamb deserves​ much better than this. He deserves, most of all, an account that makes you want to read him. His prose only intermittently wears ...”

“... of over-cautious civil servants whom the Minister has it in his power to disregard. I write to Frank Dobson, my MP, saying, intemperately, that the Minister is more of a coward than many of the men who were executed. [I have not had a reply.] Yorkshire, 15 August. To Pateley Bridge on a lovely afternoon of flashing sunshine and rushing clouds, the drive ...”

“... like a pious fish – and then we were up on our feet, and were singing ‘O Nata Lux’ by Thomas Tallis1. I knew the piece but hadn’t really listened to it. Now I was struck – assaulted, thrown – by its utter beauty: the soft equanimity of its articulation, like the voice of justice; the sweet dissonance, welcome as pain. That dissonance, with ...”

“... Did the German physicists make no atomic bombs during the Second World War because they wouldn’t or because they couldn’t? This is the question which Powers addresses in his extensive study of German atomic research: a question finally answered by the recent publication of the secretly recorded conversations between Heisenberg and the other German atomic physicists interned at Farm Hall, near Huntingdon, in the summer of 1945 ...”

“... and interesting exploration of his theme centres on the third President of the United States, Thomas Jefferson, who accessed over a third of the country’s land area in one purchase from the French, then ordered it to be surveyed by a government expedition led by army captains Meriwether Lewis and William Clark. For Jefferson, American topography was ...”

“... her and Mr Knightley from settling at Donwell, about two years; and that the letters placed by Frank Churchill before Jane Fairfax, which she swept away unread, contained the word ‘pardon’. Of the good people in Northanger Abbey and Persuasion we know nothing more than what is written; for before those works were published their author had been taken ...”

“... are many distinguished analytic philosophers, particularly admirers of Kripke like David Lewis and Frank Jackson, who are unabashed physicalist metaphysicians. They think of themselves as continuing the struggle against mystificatory nonsense that Thomas Huxley waged against Bishop Wilberforce, Russell against Bergson, and ...”

“... remarkable man. His people were from Derbyshire, which his poet son certainly didn’t advertise. Thomas Lowe Bunting took a Gold Medal for his MD thesis. He was later elected to the Royal Society in Edinburgh for his work on the histology of the lymphatic glands of all sorts of creatures. Bunting recalled his father’s ‘tiny surgery with a desk about two ...”

“... two reasons. First, the Contract was the most completely poll-driven manifesto in modern history. Frank Luntz, the Republican Party’s opinion-meister, ran questions by focus-groups and other poll-fodder until he found topics (like lower taxation) which rang a bell. If the bell rang, the plank went into the platform. If not, not. Most people don’t want a ...”

“... psychology and the backchat of a paperhanger’. Sticking to his guns, he became (in the words of Frank O’Connor) ‘the greatest of all English storytellers’.Times change. Mention Coppard today and you’ll be met with blank looks. Until recently I knew him only by name, one I associated with a brand of gently nostalgic, middlebrow English writers who ...”

“... Keith Douglas was always conscious of Isaac Rosenberg behind his shoulder, Alun Lewis of Edward Thomas. But the idea of modern warfare as one thing and of poetic response to it as another seems, in retrospect, almost Churchillian in its fixedness. Back then, although we loved the old rogue for the rodomontade and sheer cheek of his rhetoric, we got rid of ...”

“... his subject. As a boy Wallace started out reading Hardy Boys mysteries and science fiction like Frank Herbert’s Dune; by the age of 11 he was mowing a neighbour’s lawn in exchange for a tutorial on Stendhal. It was around this time that his parents gave him his own television set. He watched everything: sitcoms, game shows, Star Trek, soap operas. Among ...”