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“... idea of absence or of something thwarted is central. And that’s why it is wrong to suggest, as David Matthews does in a recent review of Carpenter’s book, that Britten’s greatness was achieved through his emotional anguish, rather than despite it. To lose the sense that something is missing in Britten’s music – the what-could-have-been and the ...”

“... where they dine with his new colleagues from Brandeis. Sontag has given birth to a son, David. She studies for masters’ degrees in literature and philosophy at Harvard. Herbert Marcuse boards in their house. The tone is one of new maturity in a high-toned world, but there are also floods of tears, feelings of imprisonment, the need to die or ...”

“... Just as the Muslim world was vibrating to the ‘insult’ visited on the Prophet Muhamed (Peace Be Upon Him) by an Anglo-Pakistani fictionist of genius and renown, the British and American mass audience was thrilling to the reborn version of David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia. The movie, which is the closest investigation most English people have made of their country’s long, intense, misunderstood encounter with Islam, is actually rather touching in its attempt to ‘understand’ the other by means of epic romance ...”

“... and governors, or to their children, the gilded youth of Juba who returned from abroad after the peace agreements, almost all ordinary businesses are run by foreigners. The hotels and restaurants lining the Nile are often Kenyan, Ugandan or Ethiopian; the Eritreans control the water-trucking, the Darfuri own most of the shops, and other businesses are owned ...”

“... less blatantly bogus accounts. As Eghigian points out, aliens – whether or not they come in peace – are always ‘identified with superior knowledge evident in their technological achievements and mastery of languages’. Again and again, they’re reported as saying that humanity’s rampant warmongering and use of nuclear weaponry is what has drawn ...”

“... them too. Gerry Adams, Martin McGuinness and Mitchell McLaughlin love the phrase ‘the peace process’ and they use it over and over again. In Northern Ireland, if you ignore the punishment beatings, peace has broken out. To keep calling it a ‘process’ is to suggest that it might end, and since the only ...”

“... and any number of ministers and favourites. In Mary Rose, his book about Brandon’s third wife, David Loades says: ‘He was present everywhere, but it is hard to pinpoint what he actually did.’ Throughout his career Charles accumulated grand-sounding titles, which confused outsiders into overestimating his importance as a policymaker. When he became ...”

“... the invocation of the threat in the first place. Hovering about every discussion of war and peace are questions of life and death. Not the death of some or even many people, but as Michael Walzer proposes in Arguing about War, the ‘moral as well as physical extinction’ of an entire people. True, it is only rarely that a nation will find its ...”

“... more rigorous and living languages’. In his last chapter, a fascinating discussion of the art of David Walliker, he makes it plain that meaningful law is impossible because under contemporary conditions of ‘ultra-modernity’ the authority required by such a law cannot exist. Instead we have only ‘the social forms of human absence’ arranged within ...”

“... the trade crisis occasioned by this terrible war’. He writes in 1915: In times of peace the weather generally forms the topic of conversation, but at the present time it is out of place to indulge in such small talk, and opinions are generally exchanged in regard to the latest news from the Front. This gives the coiffeur an excellent chance of ...”

“... study of John Everard; and there is some predictably tough and valuable political analysis from David Underdown and Nicholas Rogers. What emerges from most of these essays, however, is not so much the undoubted ideological confluence of English and American radicals, as the disparities between their respective national experiences in the past and their ...”

“... is functional, unadorned, and the tone rather desultory, as Oë picks up squabbles around the peace movement, reconstructs medical cases, celebrates doctors and campaigning journalists. The great virtue of the book is its insistence on the way the meanings of the atom bomb have been hijacked, so that it has come to stand for national strength and ...”

“... to soften the language laws, but has left them essentially unchanged in the interest of ‘social peace’ – fear of nationalist wrath if, for example, commercial signs in English were to be allowed. In recent years the percentage of Francophones in Québec has held firm and even crept up a bit, to 83 per cent. But this stabilisation is not the result of ...”

“... Somalis. I don’t hear my first bullet in Mogadishu until late afternoon. I’m standing with David Shearer, field director of the Save the Children Fund, on the flat roof of the SCF staff house, hardly troubled by the thought that we’re both crisply silhouetted against the skyline. At the report, I flinch – no, I jump. I look at Shearer and see that ...”

“... the best part of a locked-down month to get through Symbolic Forms – it is longer than War and Peace – and while I was constantly impressed by Cassirer’s scope, lucidity and command of detail, I felt starved of brilliance, insight and rigour. It was disappointing to find that Cassirer makes no attempt to explain why his three grand categories ...”