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“... not for economic reasons. They supported its political goals and were willing to pay an economic price, both personal and national, to help secure them. Such sacrifices are intelligible, Pincus indicates, once we grasp the ideological fervour behind the wars. In the early 1640s, the animating ideology was a synthesis of secular and messianic ...”

“... had never happened, and Britain was not a country so infused with the corporate spirit that Richard Branson is the first citizen of choice, according to opinion polls, for the unavailable post of president of UK plc. If boosterism and gee-whizzery were Leadbeater’s only faults, I would wish him luck and pass his book to the Oxfam shop. In normal ...”

“... The City and Social Theory, of the urban concerns of Louis Wirth, Georg Simmel, Theodor Roszak and Richard Sennet. (For some strange reason, Smith adds Sigmund Freud to the list, but this merely shows that his book is in the nature of a dissertation, rather than a treatise.) Smith would like to harmonise all these theories in some imprecise dialectic (‘the ...”

“... but a good book’. Whitman listened respectfully to the sympathetic old Brahmin, but felt the price was too high. ‘If I had cut sex out,’ he mused later, ‘I might just as well have cut everything out.’ But he was never caught, as Lawrence was to be, in the trap of a readership that supposed sex to be his special thing. Openness about it was so ...”

“... but sending their own children to private schools, of being forced to pay twice the normal price for food in accordance with this or that consumer boycott, of children forced out of school because of their parents’ membership of the ‘wrong’ trade union. Liberals often turned themselves inside out rather than see what was in front of their ...”

“... Of course, we should have reservations about the use of anecdote as a basis for public policy. Richard Posner once remarked that the United States is a nation of more than a quarter-billion people closely watched by a horde of journalists. Every bad thing that can happen will happen and it will be reported; so it may be worth not panicking until we see ...”

“... But the winning political coalition forged by FDR was shattered in the 1960s and 1970s, and under Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan American politics took a conservative turn. Democrats are still divided over how to respond.Today, an air of foreboding hangs over the party. Despite the rapid economic recovery from the pandemic, Joe Biden’s approval rating ...”

“... Depp prancing around wearing earrings. Mind you, even in the butch 1940s Mickey Rooney, Vincent Price, Clifton Webb and William Powell played nearer to the other end of the man’s men spectrum, to appreciative audiences. To say nothing of pretty-boys Cary Grant and Leslie Howard. Kanfer doesn’t by any means dismiss the argument, but he isn’t sure that ...”

“... expense of creditors and stockholders. And if savers are also small shareholders, as many are, the price they pay for protecting their deposits is the devaluation of their shares. This is absolutely not what was originally intended. The rationing of house building has one other consequence: it means that many cannot acquire somewhere adequate to live. As a way ...”

“... dismissed (which is pretty much Norman Lamont’s career in a nutshell). Later in the century, Richard FitzNeal, first as dean of Lincoln and latterly as bishop of London, continued in his day job in the church while moonlighting as treasurer ” for an apparently unbroken forty years. It’s as though Jim Callaghan were now preparing to leave 11 Downing ...”

“... Cradock points out, the apparent Soviet triumph in squashing Dubcek carried a huge long-term price. It was soon apparent that disagreement within what Brezhnev called ‘the Socialist Commonwealth’ would lead to military suppression. Albania immediately walked out of the Warsaw Pact, and the Chinese, after much reflection, contacted ...”

“... Coote’s recent biography, or the sensitive but work-obsessed administrator who figures in Richard Ollard’s excellent but now rather elderly Life. Tomalin cannot compete with Ollard’s lovingly detailed understanding of Pepys’s work as a Naval administrator, and Ollard remains the best guide to the professional Pepys (his biography is still ...”

“... smaller scales or much good at making money was somehow no obstacle to their admiration.) When the price of oil rocketed in the 1970s, mainstream America began to take seriously the counterculture’s dream of redesigning industrial society. Solar panels flourished, empty six-packs became the bricks for houses, fish grew to edible size in plastic tanks and ...”

“... so full of life, so packed with jolly anecdotes, would be bound to fetch a more than handsome price if offered for general sale. Might there not be a way of having his cake and eating it too? Hogarth’s answer was to advertise a ‘subscription’, a raffle. Visitors to his studio were invited to inspect the painting there, where they could buy one or ...”

“... to be more powerful than kings.’The cacophony of voices in McPhee’s book recalls the work of Richard Cobb; it shows a similar sensitivity to regional variation and delight in anarchic individualism. McPhee offsets popular devotion to the revolution with evidence of apathy, frustration and profanity. ‘Vive le roi! The republic can get fucked,’ one ...”