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“... to work out why original sin, even in its secular versions, was an idea we should not be trying to do without. And clearly no modern writing has yet been able to do without a version of it, whether as something to be acknowledged or as something to be defied. The problem of original sin, secularised as the problem of ...”

“... cinema barely five minutes away with multiple screens and a grown-up programming policy. I’d be free to go in the afternoon all alone (an old movie-going treat) or in company of an evening. But I don’t. I notice a film that I think might be good, and then shake my head at the idea of actually going to see it. The risk of disappointment is too ...”

“... and spewed out what was left and no use to him’; ‘if you said the wrong thing to Ben, you’d get a look from those cold blue eyes’; ‘he had the gift of relating to you in conversation which made you feel as if you were in a warm bath.’ Britten had an extreme need for the devotion of others. His ability to charm people into giving him this ...”

“... prevent any foreigner from buying a British national paper, and Colonel Qadhafi himself tried to do so in the case of the Observer. Readers have no say in the fate of their favourite paper; and shareholders are often kept in the dark. The affairs of newspaper owners seem not to belong in the public domain: indeed, the rival proprietors go to extraordinary ...”

“... cent, and fell in Yorkshire and the Humber by 8 per cent between 2010 and 2014. Lord Young, now David Cameron’s ‘enterprise tsar’, had to resign in late 2010 after suggesting that people ‘have never had it so good’.It was only after substantial Tory losses in the North at the 2014 European elections that George Osborne launched a regional ...”

“... describes is a traveller’s nightmare: Englishness lost, identity cancelled, fatal infection,’ David Seabrook writes of Thomas De Quincey. Of himself, the dole-queue De Quincey, making a high-velocity, long-term progress through the Isle of Thanet. More speed, less haste: Seabrook is a ...”

“... many books, which were not commonly known at the Universities … so that when I came to Oxford, Dr Adams, now master of Pembroke College, told me, I was the best qualified for the University that he had ever known come there.’ But the money ran out, and he was unable to complete his degree. Long before, he had stopped attending lectures because his toes ...”

“... Archer, J.M. Barrie, Arnold Bennett, A.C. Benson, Hugh Benson, Laurence Binyon, Robert Bridges, Hall Caine, G.K. Chesterton, Arthur Conan Doyle, John Galsworthy, Thomas Hardy, Maurice Hewlett, Anthony Hope, W.J. Locke, E.V. Lucas, J.W. Mackail, John Masefield, A.E.W. Mason, Gilbert Murray, Henry Newbolt, Owen Seaman, G.M. Trevelyan, H.G. Wells and Israel ...”

“... he took the platform to deliver his address, Bloch seated himself discreetly at the back of the hall. During the subsequent discussion, however, he worked his way forward, to Adorno’s evident consternation; and then, from an appropriate vantage-point, he rose to his feet and delivered an impromptu speech of great brilliance, lasting some fifteen ...”

“... You​ ought to be in a kindergarten,’ a Canadian nurse exclaimed to David Jones, aged twenty, awaiting transfer home in July 1916 after being wounded in Mametz Wood. Even a decade later, photographs show a wary child or an understudy for an adult. Prudence Pelham, the staunchest of his extended female fellowship, described him as ‘completely unsexed ...”

“... portray the Zionist pioneers waging a war of independence against the British oppressor. Jon and David Kimche provided a good example of the conventional Israeli analysis of British policy in Both Sides of the Hill: Britain and the Palestine War (1960). ‘It was a mixture of ignorance, blundering, indecision and local bias against the Jews, encouraged by ...”

“... families, broken love stories. In all his novels, human relations involve failure and pain and do lasting damage.In 1972, just before his seventieth birthday, after finishing Maigret and Monsieur Charles and without premeditation, Simenon stopped writing fiction. As with the other big decisions in his life, moving house or indeed moving country, he ...”

“... more poetry collections and pamphlets, not to mention the essays and addresses assembled in Edith Hall’s edition of his selected prose. That teacher, commemorated but unnamed in the poem ‘Them & [uz]’, was so dismayed by Harrison’s ‘barbarian’ recital of Keats’s ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ in a Northern working-class accent that he called a halt ...”

“... Peninsula in Docklands back to Farringdon. The floor above the platforms will become the ticket hall; above that is the ‘retail floor’, to be filled by Pret A Mangers and tie-on-the-fly boutiques. On its top deck, the finished station will have a garden and a restaurant with a ‘spectacular timber lattice roof’, and to one side, a large pond is ...”

“... some of the king’s closest companions and counsellors, his tent-sharers and the men of his hall. A good lord could not fail to respond ‘with alacrity’ to the news of their loss. In contemporary values, the beheadings were doubly justified, punishing the crime of oath-breaking and avenging very special deaths. Scholarly expectations of Becher’s ...”