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“... and another was Keith McNally, the proprietor of Balthazar.15 January. The police officer who shot Mark Duggan is to be returned to firearms duty just as was the officer who shot Jean Charles de Menezes. The Met doesn’t seem to understand what is wrong with this. It’s just one word. Tact.20 February. The walls of the sitting room and the study in ...”

“... the outbreak of revolution, ending capital punishment was a symbolic act. It was intended to mark the end of princely arbitrariness, show the state’s respect for human life and provide the cornerstone to a new, higher morality. The abolitionists drew on arguments that had been around since the Enlightenment. Cesare Beccaria’s Dei delitti e delle pene ...”

“... was never a ‘marvellous boy’, but he lived a boyish life in books for half a century, and Mark Storey’s Life promises to solve a puzzle about his reputation: how someone so earnest and full of ideals could draw the loyalty of one generation, the livid contempt of another, and the nostalgic indulgence of a third, without any noticeable change of ...”

“... years: over-production, less by the poets than by their publishers. Nothing is so wide of the mark as the still common notion that it’s hard to place a poetry manuscript with a publisher. It’s all too easy if you’re the right sort of poet and he’s the right sort of publisher. Reputations are made on the poetry-reading circuit, and those are ...”

“... of the 12 essayists – Michael Dummett, P.F. Strawson, David Pears, D.M. Armstrong and Charles Taylor – are concerned with these or with closely related questions. Collectively – taken together with those earlier writings of Ayer on which these essays are a commentary and with Ayer’s reply at the end of this book – they constitute an impressive ...”

“... Grazia thinks that Hamlet the play is not about consciousness, and that Hamlet the prince does not mark the emergence of a modern psychological heroism as Hegel, Marx and (in his way) Coleridge believed. Instead, she brings to the play a dose of materialist historicism: the hero’s chief problem is the loss of his succession to the crown of Denmark. This is ...”

“... sympathetic and arranged for Keith Roberts, who knew the details of the Ward proposal, and Bryan Taylor, who had just joined the Aldermaston staff, to continue work on two-stage radiation implosion devices. They were assisted in the design work by the recruitment of several members of the Harwell fast reactor team; and by 1957 they had designed a ...”

“... aside Henman and Rusedski, fared so wanly since Fred Perry, in spite of strong players like Mark Cox and Roger Taylor? Polish players – Vladimir Skonecky, Wojtek Fibak – deserve a bit of notice, as does the amazing efflorescence of the Spanish clay-court players, male as well as female, to say nothing of the great ...”

“... alive. There is still something to be said for this view, and I was reminded of it by D.J. Taylor’s snooty mimicry of textbook journalese in ‘On The Strip’, which purports to describe life on Sunset Strip, Hollywood Boulevard (‘a clotted heatscape of a place, a serpentine coil of stores and diners split in two by a wide thread of tarmac, hazy ...”

“... is failure. Success was impossible; the act of resistance was understood to be at the least a mark of defiance, at the most a preparation for some later triumph. We know what the resisters didn’t: that their enemy would be defeated, though this would be an achievement they wouldn’t share. The war wasn’t won by assassinations and victory wasn’t ...”

“... call-to-arms for all makers of literary lives, and Adam Sisman, previously a biographer of A.J.P. Taylor, has taken on a genuine task, a presumptuous task indeed, to write a biography of the biography, in the hope of casting light on the very real subject of how to make a biographical subject real. His book is successful in ways that might draw attention to ...”

“... in 1996, they can get a fix on how much nicer they are now. And this in turn keeps them up to the mark: they do things that won’t seem too terrible in four years’ time. Or forty. Even the most rudimentary diary can have this usefulness. ‘Did I really have lunch so often with him/her? Assuredly, I’ve travelled far since then. And, even allowing for ...”

“... only one or two bees per bonnet. The Pevsnerian approach was different.In a witty essay, Michael Taylor, who drove Pevsner round Warwickshire, recalls the experience as stimulating and slightly nightmarish, ‘like viewing a video of a thousand years … of history … fast-forwarded’. Pevsner ‘robbed the word “specialist” of its meaning by being a ...”

“... tracing it through Melville’s ‘The Confidence Man’, Whitman’s ‘Song of Myself’ and Mark Twain’s delight in tall tales. But sometime, date unspecified, he believes a new thing happened: people began to take it seriously and believe it. His contemporary evidence for hype’s ‘essentially American origins’ is based on Gore Vidal; it hardly ...”

“... Elizabeth puts up against her husband, the Man of Wrath. His potato-pickers, she notes, get a mark and a half a day. ‘The women get less, not because they work less, but because they are women and must not be encouraged.’ Her delight in the weather and the forests would go for nothing without her calm, dry, outrageous defence of herself as a ...”