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“... successfully – most recently in a triumphant Broadway True West, with Philip Seymour Hoffman and John C. Reilly alternating the two main roles – and last year also saw the publication of the very useful Cambridge Companion to Sam Shepard.* But his later plays have often seemed clotted, hyper-masculine, forced, and his ventures into movie direction – Far ...”

“... graduate assistants at the big state universities. It begins with an excerpt from Charles Brockden Brown and his 18th-century religious maniacs and ends with a story about a lovesick football coach in late 20th-century Albuquerque. Though it is not, of course, literally comprised of stories written only by white males, the bulk is still there: it is a ...”

“... her jewel box, while on a bench outside two young women wait with an older man (who resembles John D. Rockefeller Jr) to handle their own treasures. In the central rank, a vast hangar is filled with shrouded figures on the floor overseen by another guard (the near twin of the one below). Finally, in the top level, above an elevated platform where an ...”

“... it to an end. Indeed the curtsies might have been stopped the year before had it not been for John Grigg (then Lord Altrincham) whose sensational article in the National and English Review on the future of the monarchy had included a savage attack on debutantes and all they represented. The queen is thought to have kept the ceremony going for one more ...”

“... made them to some extent proof against their leader’s displeasure. With the exception of Gordon Brown, and possibly John Prescott, no member of the present cabinet has such standing. Ministers have no power bases within the party or the country and are largely unknown to the electorate. They owe their places in the ...”

“... brief, lucid book, which appeared not long after the Supreme Court handed down its decision in Brown v. Board of Education, outlawing racial segregation in public schools. Brown is now widely viewed as the court’s most important ruling of the 20th century, and it is easy to forget how quickly the South’s white ...”

“... it still Connecticut, the dear deer, the steady lay, the unprivate walls?’ His correspondent, John Hohnsbeen, an art-dealer friend, was having an affair with the architect Philip Johnson, and the ‘unprivate walls’ are those of Johnson’s famous Glass House. Schuyler was 28 and this was his first serious mental breakdown. He had only recently arrived ...”

“... is in London. According to David King, the former government chief scientific adviser, Blair and Brown never failed to chair a Cobra meeting. Johnson failed five times in a row, always on the subject of Covid. The reason isn’t far to seek: he didn’t understand it and didn’t take it seriously. In the early months of 2020, the UK government had 25,000 ...”

“... for Aston, Birmingham issued the following leaflet: £5 Reward! DESPERATE TORIES WILD LIE. Mr John Strachey writes: ‘It has come to my notice that Tory canvassers are making the outrageous statement that I am a foreigner. This is a most serious allegation which the Aston Tory Party, utterly beaten in political argument, has fallen back upon as a last ...”

“... to his father’s house in Northern Ireland) and the prose is usually fresh, though a ‘glans-brown sky’ seems a trifle forced, and there are occasional sentences that trespass on banality, as when bafflement comes over Maskell ‘like a fog’. Like all good novelists, Banville knows a lot, even about matters with which he cannot have had direct ...”

“... in motion, for example: a barn owl with a mouse in its beak, caught by Eric Hosking in 1948, a brown rat photographed by Stephen Dalton as it jumped from a bin in 1983. Curiosity about the look of exotic tribes was not limited to pictures from abroad. The four performers of the Abbot’s Bromley Horn Dance, taken by Benjamin Stone in 1899, stare at the ...”

“... attack those institutions which have to live with the consequences of their parsimony. Thus Gordon Brown, who has done almost as much as any man to keep poorer children out of the universities, blames the universities for excluding poorer children. There is no evidence that such attacks have done the Government any electoral good at all. To spend more, of ...”

“... Guardian covered the recent Budget, it had a lot of fun unpacking the surprises sprung by Gordon Brown in the course of his demonstration that ‘all this prudence is for a purpose.’ The point was that his ‘updated Protestant work ethic’ offered rewards both for individuals and for the nation as a whole, in the form of tax cuts and increases in public ...”

“... globally – a big if – we will before long be able to trade carbon anywhere in the world. As John Lanchester noted in the last issue of the LRB, the science of global warming is not straightforward. The basic physics has been clear since the 19th century. What’s been harder to understand in detail are matters such as the many feedback loops by which a ...”

“... an Italian football star a bit past his prime; with slightly arrogant Latin good looks and long brown hair swept back and curled carefully in a bushy mass behind his ears. His suit was fashionably baggy, though unfashionably three-piece, and his tie was fashionably bold. At the start a suppressed impatience contributed to his air of authority, but he seemed ...”