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“... than purely musical. In various autobiographical statements Stravinsky dismissed the help of Nicholas Roerich in the elaboration of the scenario: Taruskin redresses the balance by describing in detail Roerich’s contribution and four Russian sources he probably used for elaborating the ballet’s striking visual imagery. Stravinsky shaped events to make ...”

“... was in danger of falling out.’ In these matters Pym has an undoubted resemblance to Jane Austen. Nicholas Spice, in his perceptive review of Crampton Hodnet in these columns, pointed out that in many ways the Pym world is as black as hell, the vision of marriage or celibacy, work and play, equally scarifying. D.W. Harding and other academic critics have ...”

“... But The Climate of Treason is not one of these hagiograms. They really talked: David Footman, Nicholas Elliott, Sir Robert Mackenzie, George Carey-Foster, Sir Frederick Warner, agents and diplomats on the security side, and a large anonymous group of Intelligence men from both branches of the service, retired and active. The reason can be guessed ...”

“... this lack of poise is a positive thing, part of Epstein’s style, but it seems probable that, at best, it will in the end be judged a provincialism, akin to Hogarth’s ramshackle perspective. Although Gardiner insists that Epstein was highly self-critical, his output was variable. Many of the portrait busts are very fine, others are botched. When he turned ...”

“... of Richter’s work at Tate Modern is a great event. It is beautifully hung by Mark Godfrey and Nicholas Serota: packed tight and relentless room after room, by the end exhausting, and in this entirely true to Richter’s half-century of effort. The selection of work could not be better, with things often seen before enlivened by juxtaposition with the ...”

“... But what about countries where the civil service barely functions, where the rule of law is at best an aspiration and leaders deploy real weapons against their own people as well as metaphorical ones? The deliverologists would say it is even more important to have clear targets and a separate machinery for achieving them when the rest of the government is ...”

“... every respect to the people is deeply ingrained. Our culture is still one of subjecthood, at its best paternal and at its worst authoritarian.’ This hostility to the way the Left (as well as the Right) has conventionally run its and the country’s affairs is also to be found in the essays on economic and social policy. Christopher Huhne, in a ...”

“... of the same coin is struck in The Iraqi Revolution of 1958 by two of its American contributors: Nicholas Thacher, a diplomatic veteran who was in the American Embassy in Baghdad from 1956 to 58, and Frederick Axelgard, a current State Department official, both of whom consider that in the Fifties the United States displayed altogether too much deference for ...”

“... the century. In this connection it is particularly important to note that it independence was the best solution for Ireland, then it was of vital importance for two unconnected reasons that it be achieved in the first third of this century. The first reason – again ex post facto – is that if independence had not been achieved by, say, 1930, there simply ...”

“... he pragmatically calculates he’s in an impossible corner and they’ll kill him if he stays. As Nicholas Pileggi, who co-wrote the screenplay with Scorsese, says in his hideously informative Wiseguy,* the documentary book on which the film is based: ‘He willingly turned on the world he knew and the men with whom he had been raised with the same ...”

“... the literary silence? Disco Biscuits is unlikely to make many converts. The writing is at its best when, as in Gavin Hills’s ‘White Burger Danny’, it restricts itself to a near-documentary account of parties and people. E culture’s variety is well represented, and Martin Millar’s squatland South London, Alex Garland’s backpacker ...”

“... the first page establishes the milieu. ‘Had tea with dear Lady Throckmorton whose nephew Nicholas Throckmorton, Robert’s heir, called.’ Midi Gascoigne and Timmie Buxton, her sister, get a mention, as do Emerald Cunard and Denis Rickett. Logan Pearsall Smith, aged 80, starts to tell a story of an American cousin of Henry James who ‘invited the ...”

“... this fearful symmetry. At one extreme it has triggered the tricksy pretension of the Terry Johnson-Nicholas Roeg film Insignificance; at the other, it inspired Norman Mailer’s ‘novel biography’ of a ‘possible’ Marilyn, which proved a triumph of intuitive speculation. Mailer leaned heavily on the first edition of Fred Lawrence Guiles’s ...”

“... dash and novelty, but little more analysis, in the treatment accorded P.D. James, Peter Lovesey, Nicholas Freeling, Simenon, Chandler and the husband-and-wife team of Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö. Only one of the essays seems really ambitious, and the effect, I’m afraid, is comic. Eric Mottram – an otherwise much respected old friend of mine – gets ...”

“... every arms company was involved in some kind of covert dealings.’ But, he adds in the best Monday Club tradition, ‘the overriding release had always been that I was very happy that we were making money.’ The boys in the big time were encouraging him to enlarge Astra, re-tool his already spanking plant at Faldingworth, Lincs, and join them on ...”