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“... must be in some sense unbalanced. The last US Ambassador to Havana (the liberal-minded diplomat Philip Bonsal) concluded that Castro was ‘power mad’ and lacked normal human sociability. In the most florid passage of his memoirs, referring to the period just before the final break in diplomatic relations in 1960, Bonsal invokes ‘the magnetic ...”

“... and condescension, then their subjects might remain loyal and deferential to them in return. In short, this book describes how the royal family, by a mixture of lucky accident and conscious design, came to exploit the reciprocal potentialities in the gift relationship as part of their strategy for survival in an increasingly uncertain world. More ...”

“... remarkable philosophical meditation, often poignant in its belatedness; and as a letter to Philip Roth. ‘The history of Jewish literacy: now there is a delicate subject!’ Wieseltier exclaims. ‘It turns out that rabbis have been complaining for centuries that the book has often been closed to the people of the book.’ It might seem a bit offhand ...”

“... conflicted and calculating man. The shock produced is akin to the revelations about Paul de Man or Philip Larkin. Lee Siegel is horrified by the racism in Shadows, by the ‘crude, alienated caricatures’ of blacks, gentiles and vulgar Miami Jews who ‘make Goodbye, Columbus look like “World of Our Fathers” ’. According to Hadda, the people who knew ...”

“... for a time, it proved. But, as we have now discovered, only for a time. For Ramsay MacDonald and Philip Snowden in 1931, read Callaghan, Carter and Mitterrand in our own day. National economic sovereignty is once again an illusion. The huge, unprecedented growth in world trade which was one of the main engines of the long boom of the 1950s and 1960s has ...”

“... be made explicit. As an approach to past attitudes and values it is, however, no primrose path, no short cut, but a route beset by pitfalls and considerably more indirect than it looks. The basic problems have been set out, clearly and persuasively, by Delooz, whose book remains the most important study of the subject. In the first place, it is important to ...”

“... Ian Watt, J.C. Maxwell, L.C. Knights, D.J. Enright, Roy Strong, John Broadbent, Arthur Humphreys, Philip Collins, Pat Rogers, D.W. Jefferson and John Preston. What is disturbing is that everyone made his reputation elsewhere, often in the format which is properly Leavisian, the short, iconoclastic critical article. The ...”

“... description of the revolution is brief, two pages out of four hundred. His account of the short-term causes seems to be drawn mainly from Abrahamian’s book and Farhad Kazemi’s Poverty and Revolution in Iran. These matters are not strictly his concern. But his study of the spiritual malaise from which the revolution sprang is superb. In Iran ...”

“... of academic life, Stepping Westward and The History Man? I wondered, pondering his claim that in Philip Roth’s The Professor of Desire, the old woman who claims to have been Kafka’s whore ‘concentrates the tense problem of the modern muse and the sexual prompt of modern art’, or that John Updike is largely concerned with ‘the revelation of ...”

“... legislation on the preservation of hedgerows would not surprise me. On the other hand, high-yield short-stalked wheat, and peas bred to mature all at once for the viner, are here to stay. In cities warehouses are refurbished and converted to studio flats. A cocoon of scaffolding will surround a lush Edwardian facade. For a week or two sky will appear at every ...”

“... especially in the early volumes. Stephen’s anti-clericalism ensured that religion received short measure in the early stages (Keble only merited three and a half pages, and St Alban and St Asaph had to wait until the supplement to get in), while Lee’s liking for literati (his first question about a potential subject was ‘what did he ...”

“... the redemptive possibilities of science in the 1930s and 1940s, when he was writing the voluminous short stories that appeared – he produced nearly 100,000 words a month – in Astounding Science Fiction, the most popular US magazine of its kind. His stories were crass, overdetermined and breezy; his heroes morally, mentally and physically superior to the ...”

“... this summer. On 29 June, after Stella Creasy put forward an amendment to the Queen’s Speech, Philip Hammond announced that Northern Irish women who travelled to England for an abortion could for the first time have that abortion paid for by the NHS, like every other citizen and taxpayer of the UK. Sixteen ‘terminations of pregnancy’ officially took ...”

“... key debates can be carried on almost unseen in long afternotes. Even such an authoritative work as Philip Williams’s Gaitskell, with its unrivalled picture of postwar Labour politics, wholly omits Gaitskell’s colourful sex life. ‘I decided at the outset I wasn’t going into all that,’ he told me. American biography, as Robert Caro’s vast Life of LBJ ...”

“... by the elegant, modernising leader of the Ethiopians, Ras Tafari Makonnen, a.k.a. Haile Selassie. Short, combative and mischievous, Steer arrived in Addis in July, equipped with a typewriter, a shotgun and tropical kit. The temptation to graft him onto Scoop is strong: the war had yet to start and he was one of dozens of journalists holed up in the Hotel ...”