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“... especially if you take into account what Moss calls ‘their chums from other disciplines – Clive James, Craig Raine, James Fenton, Christopher Hitchens, Redmond O’Hanlon’. Together, novelists and ‘chums’ are not unlike a coterie of window-cleaners crowded onto a single boatswain’s chair (or rather bench): each time one of them tugs on his ...”

“... In 1507 Damian, Abbot of Tungland – variously known as ‘the Italian’ or ‘Master John, the French leech’ – undertook to fly from Scotland to France. ‘To that effect he had a pair of wings made from feathers. When they were fastened to him, he flew from the castle walls of Stirling, but at once fell to the ground and broke his ...”

“... before a special jury, at Warwickshire Assizes. The defendants included the venerable Major John Cartwright, the ‘Father’ of English Reformers; the editor of the Radical Black Dwarf, T.J. Wooler; and Edmonds, the secretary of the Birmingham reformers. Their offences arose out of the same context as the Peterloo meeting in support of manhood ...”

“... of our bodies.’ Imagine what it would be like to have worked for more than twenty years, as Clive Stafford Smith has, defending death-row inmates in the American South, only to find oneself in Guantánamo, what the military calls ‘the least worst place’, trying to win the trust of men who have not even been put on trial, who have not been accused of ...”

“... her ‘misfortune to suffer very great mischiefs from the assistance of architects’; Sir John Cope, of Bramshill, whose ‘apartments are so vastly spacious that one generally sees Sir John toward the winter put on his hat to go from one room to another’; John Mytton, of ...”

“... and warm hearts, not for pedantic historians. Gallacher was one of those who put it about that John Maclean was out of his mind, literally hallucinating, when he ran his Scottish Workers Republican Party in opposition to the infant CPGB. Nevertheless, the name of the great Marxist dominie was repeatedly invoked, and Pat Lally, Glasgow’s Labour ...”

“... than author in whatever he writes, in his massive study Hinduism and in his scholarly books on Clive and Max Muller no less than in his autobiographies. Generosity, rare in authors, is his most beatific quality. He remains dedicated to the memory of the Empire, and to the ‘challenge’ he and his kind made to it – Civis Britannicus sum – because ...”

“... creative impulse), it was not out of the desire to register the world around him. His friend John le Gay Brereton could see the importance of Henry Lawson. Brennan couldn’t. He had no interest in the bush, the Labour movement or Australian nationalism. In the Australian Nineties, a period which self-consciously but justifiably felt itself to be alive ...”

“... made even more significant by the fact that it carries a 20-page introduction specially written by John Bayley. The author of the most distinguished book on Pushkin in any language, Bayley here gives the essence of his thoughts on Pushkin in general and Eugene Onegin in particular. Bayley’s book has always been the best full-length introduction to ...”

“... transformation started ten years ago, when England won the rugby world cup under the guidance of Clive Woodward, who went on to become ‘director of elite performance’ at the British Olympic Association (he retired in 2012, just after the summer games). Two years later, the England cricket team ‘took back’ the Ashes after eight straight defeats to ...”

“... whom they forgive.It wasn’t that he was particularly good-looking – according to his friend John Lehmann he was ‘a great, untidy, sprawling figure of a young man’. Virginia Woolf blamed his lack of looks on his father’s family: ‘He had a strong element of the Bell in him. What do I mean? I think I mean that he was practical & caustic & shrewd ...”

“... Asian history appended to The Gates of Ivory is probably only the second of its kind in fiction. (Clive James, as I recall, made the breakthrough a few years ago.) There are chunks of roman à clef, and at least one recurrent character whose description verges on the libellous. Most of it works, with the exception of some of the more portentous utterances ...”

“... oll. No, we must lie down and let the Tebbit knock us through the ground. He’s got the goods, as Clive would say – the wit, the guns, the snarly charm, a voice that rasps and minges like a Black & Decker …’ He stops to pull a stray ear of grassy corn from out the ditch. ‘Though on the other hand, perhaps one should join something (I hear Craig Raine ...”

“... than Labour – they don’t have to fear accusations of defeatism and a lack of patriotism. John Major continued the trend in the 1990s even as the navy argued vigorously for two new fleet carriers to replace the three small Invincible-class ships.This was effected under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown and, after many delays and much cost inflation, the ...”

“... above are collections of essays. The first contains two especially interesting pieces: one by John Coombes on Orwell’s despised Popular Front, and one by Valentine Cunningham on the famous pamphlet ‘Authors take sides in the Spanish War’. The second collection is much more interesting because it contains material by survivors: in fact, it is ...”