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“... Said speaks of. I watch my children grow up as Americans in the same way that I might read about, or create, fictional characters. They are not fictional, of course, but their Americanism can sometimes seem unreal to me. ‘I have an American seventh-grader,’ I say to myself with amazement, as I watch my 12-year-old daughter perform at one of ...”

“... yet you do not want to be destroyed, but perhaps hope may be preserved for complete strangers to read, is ineradicable. We want to confess ourselves in writing to a few friends, and we do not always want to feel that no one but those friends will ever read what we have written.Eliot’s considerable correspondence with ...”

“... love for the common man, but written in such a forbidding way that the common man is unlikely to read it. Well, The Lord of the Rings is the opposite. It is a work written to keep the modern world at bay that the modern world adores. In the late 1990s, Best Book polls conducted for Waterstone’s and Channel Four, the Daily Telegraph, the Folio Society and ...”

“... her even more than usual. Her father was dying at the time. It wasn’t exactly that men could read her thoughts, but certainly she felt that they were picking up on her vulnerability, seizing their moment to probe an open wound. They were excited by her distress (one target of Weinstein’s advances said he was clearly roused by her fear). The aim of ...”

“... the tongue of Foucault’. Even the austere European Journal of International Law thought it ‘read like a thriller’.Signal amid this enthusiasm has been a lack of curiosity about the author himself. To understand The Passage to Europe, however, a sense of where van Middelaar comes from is required. Born in 1973 in Eindhoven, the company town of Phillips ...”

“... in its progress to cover this country with permanent disgrace, I do not know and have not read of.’ A comic classic, Foreign Mud by Maurice Collis, tells the story, but in China the Opium War is not funny. The veteran director Xie Jin’s new $12 million blockbuster (the budget was raised in Shanghai) modelled, he says, on Schindler’s ...”

“... to be done just on a whim’. A whim? She has obviously not spoken to any transsexual people or read a word they have written. In her current TV series I Am Cait, Jenner is keen to extend a hand to transsexual women and men who don’t enjoy her material privileges. She has made a point of giving space to minority transsexuals such as Zeam Porter who face ...”

“... is spared – in Freud’s words, ‘the perplexity and helplessness of the human race’.To read Freud against this backdrop is to witness someone capable of the wildest fluctuations, covering the entire range of switching moods to which everyone I know, affected by today’s pandemic, has at one point or another succumbed. ‘We are suffering under no ...”

“... notice of her, the waitress even calling her ‘duck’ and offering her a copy of the Mirror to read while she waited for her bacon, egg, baked beans and fried bread. It wasn’t a paper she would normally read, but bacon, egg, baked beans and fried bread wasn’t a breakfast she would normally eat either, and she got so ...”

“... a first draft of The Idiot in the early 2000s, publishing it only in 2017 – by which point Donald Trump, a familiar figure from my youth, was somehow in charge of the United States, and Roe was under serious threat, and I, on the eve of my fortieth birthday, was going around the country promoting a ‘debut novel’ about a painful crush I had had when ...”

“... week since the vote. The Tories appear to have found their Hillary Clinton, and disposed of their Donald Trump. The real Hillary Clinton will be breathing a sigh of relief. The Labour Party, precisely because it realised that Corbyn might be contemplating the kind of pivot described above, has risen in arms to preserve its essential City connection. What will ...”

“... nearly wrecking talks on strategic arms limitation (Ford’s young, hawkish secretary of defence, Donald Rumsfeld, had successfully called for a freeze on Salt II). Castro was taking big risks, but as Gleijeses argues, his adventures in Latin America had reached an impasse, while Africa still offered opportunities. Cuba had its anti-imperialist credentials to ...”

“... Facebook is generally agreed to have played a big, perhaps even a crucial, role in the election of Donald Trump. The benefit to humanity is not clear. This thought, or something like it, seems to have occurred to Zuckerberg, because the new mission statement spells out a reason for all this connectedness. It says that the new mission is to ‘give people the ...”

“... Dream, Caroline Finkel’s massive 550-page history of the Ottoman Empire published in 2006, we read that ‘terrible massacres took place on both sides.’ As for genocide, the very word is a misfortune, which not only ‘bedevils any wider understanding of the history of the fate of Ottoman Armenians’ – not to speak of ‘Turkish foreign relations ...”

“... king, is the new broom he was thought to be when he succeeded his father in 1999. Finally, as we read about the long struggles between prisoners and invigilators, we encounter a brutal parody of high politics in the outside world: shame, betrayal, self-deception and the art of deceiving others, though the guards in Tazmamart were the inmates’ only ...”