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“... in 1933 he lived with his parents and older sister in the now famous 5 Cwmdonkin Drive in a middle-class suburb of Swansea. He had an undistinguished career at school: though he was a notoriously good actor and mimic, he was not academic. He worked on a local newspaper after leaving school but preferred to spend his time, when not obsessively writing his ...”

“... increasingly tyrannical measures to suppress radical discontent, and as England and France went to war, Wordsworth went from feeling ‘Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,/But to be young was very heaven!’ to saying that he ‘Yielded up moral questions in despair’. That mental trajectory had poetic consequences. Roe takes us through that process moment ...”

“... at home, virtual pariah status abroad. While the Western media is full of resurgent Cold War rhetoric, recent polls by the Levada Centre, one of the few independent research outfits remaining in Russia, show overwhelming support – 85 per cent – for the annexation of Crimea; they also show that in November 59 per cent thought the country was ...”

“... in the dockside streets of Bristol by thugs in the pay of his brother, conveyed aboard a man of war, HMS Ruby, and strangled with a length of ship’s rope, his cravat having proved inadequate for the job. Captain Goodere and three accomplices were hanged on St Michael’s Hill in Bristol the following April. Foote immediately scented commercial potential ...”

“... would have brought her, Colley says, ‘to within touching distance of Britain’s governing class’. But there was not much time for romance. The outbreak of the Seven Years War brought the threat of French invasion, and led to Milbourne’s hurried transfer to Gibraltar. Gibraltar was also under threat; if ...”

“... enough in the past (though still present enough for millions of people) to be treated as the Great War might be in literary novels of the 1920s or 1930s. The counterweight to Virginia Woolf’s Clarissa Dalloway, for instance, with her intimations of bliss and connectedness, was the psychologically ruined war veteran ...”

“... Schneider were born in 1946 and 1947 respectively, both of them into a ‘wealthy upper-middle-class background’ in the staunchly Catholic Rhine-Ruhr region.* The parents of both men benefited from Germany’s postwar Wirtschaftswunder, or ‘economic miracle’: Hütter’s father was a businessman from Krefeld, near Düsseldorf, who traded in ...”

“... and so people have instead become obsessed with performance data, using it as if to fight a proxy war. Performance data aren’t necessarily a bad thing: it can be extremely helpful for teachers to look in the abstract at what their classes have been doing, so that instead of the usual jumble of humanity they see gaps and trends. The humungous datasets of the ...”

“... discrete composition blocks, each enriched (again like a wedding-cake) to maximum capacity. In a class-structure of poetic forms, it is perhaps aptly described as nouveau-riche. Oldham seems at home with that, and the fact may reflect (stylistically rather than biographically speaking) his own odd relations with the court wits. Sardanapalus, traditionally a ...”

“... parodic woman’s novel seems initially all about. The title proclaims another skirmish in the sex war, and an unprepossessing jacket reinforces this theme: an unnaturally small, weakly-looking male, the hero, Stanley Duke, is threatened by a half-circle of four towering women. The blurb beckons to women to read, in order to be outraged: ‘it is not a book ...”

“... twice, which proved to me once and for all that I was not cut out for education. After the last war began, my cousins, one by one, were called up into the Army. A few months later, they came out again, one by one, and went home, and burned their uniforms in the bedroom grate. They then lived, without identity-card or ration-book or gas-mask, and went on ...”

“... off my hat to Balzac! I must open it!’ Satire can’t buy you friends but it buys you a better class of enemy (the aphorism, originally applied to money, has a ring of Karl Kraus but is Spike Milligan’s). Bennett had been dead for five years when Cape announced the imminent appearance of The Roaring Queen in 1936, but there was enough disobliging matter ...”

“... in recent years, it has fallen, ineffective, to the ground. One million marched against the war in Iraq (I think it was one, Judt says two, I loved the inflation): it made no difference. There is a fundamental ‘disconnect’ between the people and those who claim to represent them. As the last 18 months have so brutally testified, the ...”

“... which were taking place in the Belgian Congo. Who could foresee his own terrible fate during the war as he stood in our drawing room passionately denouncing the cruelties he had seen? Conrad’s biographer Frederick Karl is unsure when this visit took place, but if we are to believe Casement’s Black Diary – and Angus Mitchell, who has edited The Amazon ...”

“... American by dint of having lived in the United States followed by service in the Army during World War One. Partly because this alternative was not only implausible but imposed on me, I found it far from convincing. To say ‘I am an American citizen’ in the setting of an English school, with wartime Cairo dominated by British troops and what seemed to me a ...”