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“... Mew may have grown up to be secretive – she was certainly no party-goer – but she wrote quite freely about her childhood, directly in prose, obliquely in her poems. She enjoyed nursery life: in some ways she never got over it. ‘I like you best when you are small,’ says a would-be lover, in her poem ‘On the Road to the Sea’, and though Mew may here ...”

“... feeler, thinker, chooser. In considering each element in turn, I use the expression ‘the self’ freely, as a loose name for all the undeniably real phenomena that lead us to think and talk in terms of the self. This doesn’t rule out the possibility that the best thing to say, in the end, is that there is no such thing. The first claim, that the self is ...”

“... in part to buy time while composing the next line. (As it happens, Parry corresponded with John and Alan Lomax, who travelled around the American South recording folk musicians.) ‘The singer of tales,’ Parry later wrote, ‘has no pen and ink to let him slowly work out a novel way of recounting novel actions, but must make up his tale without ...”

“... him with Basil Fawlty. Except that the dying Dennis Potter went further, maybe, when he called John Birt, the BBC’s then director-general, ‘a croak-voiced Dalek’ in 1993. Much expectation surrounded Doctor Who’s return last year, into an industry that has changed vastly since he went away. Mark Thompson, the BBC’s current director-general, sees ...”

“... to the astronauts, as well as their families and the engineers. Now that the Life archive is freely available on Google Books, it’s easy to see how central coverage of the space programme was to the magazine in the 1960s, when it had a circulation of almost ten million. By the time the Apollo programme ended in 1972, public enthusiasm for space travel ...”

“... was homosexual.’ Thirty years later, when Eliot’s prestige and influence were at their zenith, John Peter, a Canadian academic, published an article in Essays in Criticism called ‘A New Interpretation of The Waste Land’. Peter argued that the poem was at heart an elegy that might be compared to Tennyson’s In Memoriam: ‘At some previous time the ...”

“... one does: ‘When I was in graduate school I was startled to find this story’s source in The John Collier Reader, – or so I have always believed until this afternoon, when I first riffled, then paged carefully, front to back, back to front, through the local copy (Knopf, 1972) and discovered no trace of such a story anywhere in the book.’ But over ...”

“... would be permissible in a system that kept government spending firmly in check, and exporting gold freely abroad during wartime was impossible. The state assumed new and unprecedented powers over the national economy. The bank lost ground to the Treasury, which among other things took charge of approving new issues of currency. (Lord Cunliffe, governor of the ...”

“... and thinking about Cézanne. ‘Je vois. Par taches,’ Cézanne remarked, which Clark translates freely as ‘seeing is patchwork.’ Saying what the art is ‘about’, Clark states in this same spirit: ‘I flinch from doing this.’ He is thus most mimetic in his desire to tarry in the antinomies of a Cézanne painting, as Cézanne tarries in the ...”

“... Hannen, President of the Probate, Divorce and Admiralty Division of the Court of Appeal; and Sir John Day and Sir Archibald Levin Smith, both from the High Court: ‘Unionists to a man,’ as Roy Jenkins describes them in his Life of Gladstone. But what were these judges thinking of, presiding over a tribunal to which none of the ordinary rules applied, set ...”

“... good, we should be grateful for what they have offered us, which is certainly ‘good enough’. John Roemer’s book addresses an entirely different set of questions. It takes a long, hard look at some classical concepts in Marxism and, in doing so, transforms them completely. Before I go on to explain and discuss his views, I should mention that I am ...”

“... and Josephine abandoned their new house, and in the autumn of 1906 moved to 4 Marlborough Road, St John’s Wood, where they spent the rest of their lives. A photo taken in the back garden shows Chester wearing a suit, Josephine in a deckchair. It wasn’t Crag Head. The garden had a single pear tree, which they jokingly called ‘the orchard’. In 1908 ...”

“... to him, Rowland had stopped all Lonrho advertising going to the Observer because of criticism by John Davies, the City Editor, over the Lonrho-House of Fraser negotiations. Conor Cruise O’Brien was characteristically frank in writing in his column for the paper that it would be absurd for anybody to suppose that he would feel he could write as ...”

“... though, Johnston maintains the old rules only in order to increase the number of ways he can speak freely. All those ways are on view in his rendition of ‘Onegin’s Journey’. But anyone wanting to acquaint himself with Pushkin would be advised to turn in the first instance to the Eugene Onegin translation itself, which Penguin has now brought out. The ...”

“... not wishing to cause embarrassment or ill-feeling, destroyed letters in which Austen wrote too freely or satirically about other family members. But for the reader of Austen’s fiction, hungry for a sense of the author’s inner life, Cassandra’s depredations can only seem like older-sister arrogance of the most mortifying sort: a jealous winnowing down ...”