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“... hear a friend of his read. I had come to hear the Minister for the Arts describe the Government’s support for literature. At 7 p.m., as the Minister began to speak, Seth looked nonplussed and started for the door. It was too late, he was trapped.I knew it was Vikram Seth because I had studied his face on the jacket of An Equal Music. The night before, I had ...”

“... runs the oldest-established permanent floating crap game in New York; or it might recall Lessing’s play, Nathan the Wise, about the good Jew making peace between Muslim and Christian in the Holy Land. But really Michael Wharton, in his ‘Peter Simple’ role, is more like the original prophet Nathan, telling an interesting little fable which abruptly ...”

“... by about 20 per cent a year. But they are probably too expensive for you. A standard-issue SS dress dagger is worth at least $1500. A lock of Eva Braun’s hair will cost you $3500. A small watercolour possibly by Hitler will cost you roughly $4500. The 1938 Mercedes which he gave to Eva Braun may cost you ...”

“... indeed we are all Ruritanians now. These fears weren’t formulated in response to George Konrad’s hefty new book, but they might have been. I don’t know when I last felt so mutinous while reading a book. A Feast in the Garden is an absolutely dire novel, misconceived, opportunistic, inflated, poorly written, cynical and ...”

“... on what you are allowed to see, which may be controlled by regulation or social convention. So, for instance, at the Paris Opéra in the 1870s, women were not under any circumstances permitted to sit in the orchestre. And they could only sit in the parterre, or rear stalls, if accompanied by a man. An unaccompanied woman could only attend a matinée. At ...”

“... which British journalists regularly confuse with the Declaration of Independence, is calibrated so as to correct the arithmetical simplicities of an undifferentiated popular will. The Presidential election of 2000 introduced the world not only to the vagaries of the franchise in Florida, user-unfriendly butterfly ballots, and the arcana of chad ...”

“... would settle the Scottish Question, and conveniently kill off the nationalist threat to Labour’s Scottish stronghold. It was unseemly, however, to express such sentiments in the raw. Home Rule was a momentous constitutional reform, and New Labour’s radicalism in this area was to be properly celebrated as such (not ...”

“... if not non-existent. As a money-making enterprise, writing makes no sense. According to the UK’s official graduate careers website, prospects.ac.uk (a depressing but entirely reliable source, to which I direct my own eager students when they come to me for advice before wisely becoming arts administrators, baristas, or hedge-fund managers), the annual ...”

“... idea that we might go on holiday. In any event, we did eventually go on holiday – to Butlin’s holiday camp in Skegness – and the Moon came along very loyally. I was getting into poetry and the Moon was becoming a thing to conjure with for the solo flier. At Skegness, I sat on the edge of a fountain with a neon sign behind me which said: ‘Our True ...”

“... Enrico Donati’s small painting White to White features an aggressively encrusted pale rectangle with a second rectangle – black, white and brown – in its top left corner. Dated 1953, fairly early for such deliberately coarse abstraction, the painting landed in the collection of the famously plain-spoken art critic Clement Greenberg ...”

“... died of before. Men dying in the time it takes to catch and throw off a cold: ‘One Thursday,’ David France writes in How to Survive a Plague, ‘sexy Tommy McCarthy from the classifieds department stayed out late at an Yma Sumac concert. Friday he had a fever. Sunday he was hospitalised. Wednesday he was dead.’ Later, there were tests. A virus ...”

“... Much has been said in recent days about the instability of Pakistan. But the danger lies not so much within the population as a whole, where religious extremists are a small minority (more confessional votes are cast in Israel than Pakistan), as within the Army. Officers and other ranks who have worked with the Taliban in Afghanistan and the Lashkar-i-Tayyaba in Kashmir have become infected with zealotry ...”

“... Halfway through the second series of new-century Doctor Who, and it’s looking dicey. The problem became clear to me in episode five, ‘Rise of the Cybermen’, as the relaunched 1970s arch-villains stamped in their silver moon-boots across the stately home’s front lawn. Fundamentally, they just aren’t Daleks, are they? The first series, the one that was on last year, had Daleks, hordes of them, and what a delight they were: gliding like priests, talking like Nazis, chimerical yet simple, and with that unpleasantly ambiguous relation to the ground beneath them ...”

“... years later Wertham was called as an expert witness for the NAACP in one of the cases reviewed in Brown v. Board of Education. With the evidence of his experiences treating traumatised children in Harlem, he persuaded a federal judge that school segregation was a danger to public health.Unfortunately for Wertham’s ...”

“... are impossible and entirely unnatural … I was surprised by his sloppiness, artificiality … so awkward … outright unartistic.’ Nabokov used it as an example of bad style: ‘Dostoevsky is not a great writer, but a rather mediocre one – with flashes of excellent humour, but, alas, with wastelands of literary platitudes in between.’ Supremely ...”