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“... Western propaganda as a sullen bunch waiting to throw flowers at Clint Eastwood lookalikes. Let’s get straight to what is so unwise about this war, leaving aside for the moment its illegality and international unpopularity. In the first place, no one has satisfactorily proved that Iraq possesses weapons of mass ...”

“... I happened to read Michael Barber’s rather off-beat and amusing biography of Anthony Powell while waiting for a delayed easyJet flight from Stansted to Belfast and enduring all the usual privations of short-haul, low-cost flying: being shunted from gate to gate, and from sky-blue-upholstered departure lounge to sky-blue-upholstered departure lounge; and being jostled, and jostling, on this occasion in the very burly company of the young men and women of the Scottish Gymnastics Display Team, and an elderly couple, both in wheelchairs, and a man tattooed from neck to wrist, and possibly lower, who was working his way loudly through a large box of Quality Street ...”

“... dispensed with the Wilson Government – its penetration was taken as read – slandered Wilson’s own loyalties and those of several members of his Cabinet, and then moved on to the Royal family. The thrust of his accusations was that Mountbatten, ‘a dodgy character’, had managed to slip onto the staff at Buckingham Palace a secretary who was either ...”

“... origin. Moreover, they retained the habit even when these places passed under different masters, so that Nouvelle Orléans calmly became New Orleans, and Nieuw Zeeland New Zealand. Just how odd this practice was can be seen from the fact that although Arabs settled, and sometimes set up statelets, all round the perimeter of the Indian Ocean, and speakers of ...”

“... We might be tempted to let familiarity blunt the impact of these facts on our mind, were it not so frequently refreshed by news of ever more powerful weapons, ever-increasing numbers in the stockpiles, and ever more efficient means of delivering them to their targets. Any future nuclear attack could be, and probably will be, enormously more devastating than ...”

“... probably within a few years. Granted a certain stage of development in knowledge of the body’s physiology and biochemistry, the discovery of insulin was inevitable. What Bliss has done for insulin, Gwyn Macfarlane does for penicillin in this excellent new biography of Alexander Fleming. Macfarlane, an emeritus professor of clinical pathology at ...”

“... A crucial incident in Patrimony comes when Roth’s aged and ill father, Herman, ‘beshats himself’, as he puts it:   ‘Don’t tell the children,’ he said, looking up at me from the bed with his one sighted eye.   ‘I won’t tell anyone,’ I said. ‘I’ll say you’re taking a rest.’   ‘Don’t tell Claire ...”

“... Cynthia Ozick’s critical writing everywhere expresses a ferocious distaste for the purely aesthetic. The central idea in Art and Ardour, her collection of critical essays, concerns the conflict between the aesthetic and the moral views of literature and of life. She tells the story of a friend’s child coming across a statue of an Egyptian cat deity in a museum ...”

“... The Royal Beasts contains works of Empson’s previously unpublished or published long ago and very obscurely. There is a short play, an unfinished novel, a ballet scenario and a batch of poems, all early. It is the third posthumous volume and much the most important, though a fourth – a collection of essays on 17th-century poetry and drama – is promised for 1987 ...”

“... more than a twinge of conscience that he and his colleagues found the challenge to Mark Twain’s great novel offensive because it violated ‘academic norms of objectivity’. Anyone teaching literature and writing criticism nowadays knows that the appeal to objectivity will no longer do. Indeed, any such appeal may even be suspected – for instance, in ...”

“... Dickie, you’re so crooked that if you swallowed a nail you’d shit a corkscrew!’ Thus the irascible Field Marshal Sir Gerald Templer, in a ‘Templerism’ openly addressed to Lord Louis Mountbatten. It is one of Philip Ziegler’s virtues as an official biographer that he is willing to quote the unkind as well as the kind remarks about his hero ...”

“... Here’s a novella of slightly over 30,000 very plain words – Philip Roth’s shortest book since The Prague Orgy – structurally straightforward, winnowed of syntactical excitement, sterilised of jokes, rhythmically muted, baldly plotted, low on confrontation, low on tension, low on brilliancies and generally low all round ...”

“... open, and the study has been converted to a playroom, and fathers are expected to be on hand. Even so, inaccessibility remains a dominant motif: the workaholic dad, out early and back late, available only at weekends; the divorced dad, living elsewhere, available only on alternate weekends; the abusive or alcoholic dad, available but not to be trusted; the ...”

“... bombed by Israeli warplanes on 4 June 1982. Two days later the Israeli Army breached the country’s southern border. Menachem Begin was then Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon Minister of Defence. The immediate reason for the invasion was the attempted assassination of the Israeli Ambassador to Britain, blamed by Begin and Sharon on the PLO, whose forces in South ...”

“... 2 January. Catching up on the literary round-ups at the year’s end I’m struck as so often by how cantankerous the world of literature is, and how smarmy, both backbiting and back-scratching much more so than the theatre or show business generally ...”