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“... can see most of his right shoulder, but only a little of his left) that at some point a strip of wood about two inches wide (the painting is on two oak panels) has been detached from the right-hand side. This is a pity, since it is just where we would expect the words ‘Aet. suae’ next to the sitter’s age, and maybe a small heraldic badge to indicate ...”

“... of the Semites.Eliot Weinberger’s recent books include What Happened Here: Bush Chronicles. Michael Wood A New York Times reporter describes the ‘lethal tricks’ of Hamas in Gaza. I don’t doubt the existence of the tricks, but the implication is that the far more lethal directness of the Israeli attack is not only justified but morally ...”

“... ill and like getting old, who prefer winter to summer and autumn to spring’. These Babes in the Wood crave the rainy, stained and soggy. Yet the later Murdoch was a hard-line Tory, who may well have been liberal in her aesthetics but was hardly so in her politics. She had right-wing views on most topics, and lambasted the work of Derrida while having only ...”

“... wearing when captured. It’s a pity that they hadn’t had a chance to see the movie reviewed by Michael Wood on another page of this issue of the LRB, in which an outnumbered group of the military stood up a lot more robustly for the West in an earlier clash of civilisations: the Spartans at Thermopylae (the movie version of whose last stand is ...”

“... The Reader is a Holocaust drama laced with a coming-of-age narrative; Slumdog Millionaire, as Michael Wood said rather beautifully in the last issue, is about the ‘war on error’, revealing the desperate but ultimately triumphant lives of a group of poor children in modern Mumbai; Frost/ Nixon is about the showbusiness-ing of politics and about ...”

“... interesting thing about the writer in question. Often, though, this invented self is a problem. Michael Wood’s oustandingly brilliant new book is in part a corrective to the public persona adopted by his subject. Wood calls this persona ‘Nabokov the mandarin’, and robustly describes it as ‘a set ... of ...”

“... his father had him locked up for a few minutes in a police cell, an episode that became, as Michael Wood puts it, the ‘myth of origin’ for his powerful distrust of authority. Ackroyd rummages dutifully for further evidence. Was young Alfred beaten at school by a ‘black-robed Jesuit’? Or caught out in the open when the Zeppelins raided ...”

“... but not an intraduisible in sight. As for the achievement of Emily Apter, Jacques Lezra and Michael Wood in orchestrating the English edition, that qualifies as heroic. The French and English differ in certain important respects concerning both the choice of terms and the word order. The English has ‘philosophical lexicon’ where the French has ...”

“... more cagey than ‘eloquence’ can suggest. ‘Stealthy’ is another possibility – a word Michael Wood used in introducing the collection of Frank’s essays we published to mark his 90th birthday. But as I pile on the epithets I hear Frank’s voice in my head and I stop. Last February Frank gave a lecture at the British Museum – one of three ...”

“... thousand words. At that rate, the 290,000 words of ‘beautifully crafted descriptions’ – as Michael Wood put it in his review in the LRB of 3 January – that make up Eça de Queirós’s ‘masterly’ The Maias would have cost Dedalus £23,000 to translate. If it paid for it itself, of course: grants are available to English-language publishers ...”

“... thought, had died by his own hand in poverty and despair, neglected by the metropolitan world. Michael Suarez’s account here shows that Chatterton’s relations with the book trade after he arrived in London were far busier and more profitable than is commonly supposed. In the early summer of 1770 he was networking at Tom’s and the ...”

“... any of this. Elizabeth Wilmshurst, the deputy Foreign Office legal adviser, resigned; her boss, Michael Wood, stoically remained in place and subsequently received a knighthood. Unusually, the holders of the Oxbridge chairs in international law, James Crawford and Vaughan Lowe, took a public stance against the government. The controversy ...”

“... beyond 1441 was needed, suppressing the contrary opinion of Goldsmith and of the FCO legal adviser Michael Wood. A month later Straw stopped Goldsmith giving advice (Lord Turnbull, the cabinet secretary, told the inquiry that ‘it would have been better’ if Goldsmith’s advice had been obtained earlier). Further meetings took place, without records ...”

“... performances which is highly visible, highly stylised, and which I find dull and narrow’, as Michael Wood put it – is not present. Instead we find him struggling with sleep, dreaming about appointments in museums and zoology departments (an entire category of what he called ‘professional dreams’) and remembering his father: ‘It is odd that ...”

“... time, his narrator Braithwaite falls into a witty, hard-boiled, smart-arse tone (like that of his wood-worm who stows away aboard the Ark, or of the private eye Duffy in the crime novels he publishes as ‘Dan Kavanagh’), thus effectively wrecking the parallel, which it is part of Barnes’s scheme to draw, between Braithwaite and the shy and bumbling ...”