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“... conditions of its production.’ In support of this claim, Norris paraphrases an argument of Michael Ryan from his Marxism and Deconstruction, makes numerous, if cryptic allusions to the writings of Derrida, and relies on his interpretation of the ‘hard’ deconstruction of Paul de Man. This reliance makes for very heavy going. His discussion of de Man ...”

“... When, in May, Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson gives up his role as Tory MP for the Spectator to take over from Michael Heseltine as the editor of Henley-on-Thames, you have to wonder where they’re going to find someone sufficiently blond to be his successor at Doughty Street (from which sturdy address the organ Johnson currently oversees emerges each week ...”

“... him: Gordon Brown wouldn’t be the only disappointed person were Tony Blair to be succeeded by Michael Howard. Caracalla was succeeded by Macrinus, a co-conspirator of Martialis, the man who did the actual stabbing and was shortly afterwards caught and impaled. Macrinus, thoroughly incompetent, was dead within 14 months, to be replaced by Heliogabalus, a ...”

“... paid to all philosophical argument.’ So much for dialectical materialism, a philosophy for which Alexander Zinoviev feels a professional scorn. Zinoviev’s academic speciality is logic, and his main work in that field (popularised in a forbidding volume called Logical Physics) is an analysis of the cogency and implications of the language of science. The ...”

“... osteomyelitis and most wound infections after surgery. It was discovered in the late 1870s by Alexander Ogston, a surgeon at the Aberdeen Royal Infirmary.Alexander Fleming was studying Staphylococcus aureus when he discovered penicillin in 1928, and the first patient to be treated in the first clinical trial of the new ...”

“... capacity of many nations.In a beautifully produced book, The Fate of the Forest, Susanna Hecht and Alexander Cockburn describe the political background to the ecological disaster in the Amazonian jungle. They start with the conquistadores, the blighting of their hopes, the displacement of the Indians, the wars between land barons and settlers. The crux for the ...”

“... years on the go/From far away and takes light years arriving.’ Murray’s biographer, Peter Alexander, makes the striking claim that Murray had the poorest background of any English poet since Keats. Enough to bend anyone not double – which is a misnomer really – but half. One might as well go for an astronaut. And yet Heaney is upright, bare-headed ...”

“... thereafter in Italy. Carpenter, predictably, finds the three essayists – Richard Humphreys, John Alexander and Peter Robinson – ‘taking a rather solemn approach to the whole thing’; whereas, he assures us, Pound’s exertions on behalf of these arts partook ‘more than a little of the amiable joke’. Before it is through, Pound’s centenary year ...”

“... edifying subtext was supplied last February, in the congressional testimony by Trump’s fixer Michael Cohen: ‘Have you ever seen Mr Trump personally threaten people with physical harm?’ ‘No: he would use others.’ ‘He would hire other people to do that?’ ‘I’m not sure he had to hire them, they were already working there. Everybody’s ...”

“... a soldier and the British consul in Addis Ababa, was a powerful influence on her son’s life. Alexander Maitland introduces this biography with his meeting with Thesiger in Kathleen’s Chelsea flat in 1964: Cocooned in a woollen shawl and an old-fashioned lace-trimmed mob cap, she lay propped up on pillows, with writing paper and books spread out on the ...”

“... to All Quiet on the Western Front. But he died in 1970, leaving it unfinished: a massive stub. Michael Hofmann, his translator, recalls some other unfinished fictions. But this is not The Mystery of Edwin Drood or The Man without Qualities. Those two books lack their ends, but what remains doesn’t feel raw or rough; they simply break off. The Promised ...”

“... offers the poet and thinker. It is a representation that has more in common with the head of Alexander the Great on a coin, with Queen Elizabeth in any number of portraits, or Queen Victoria in the statues that stand on plinths in squares and parks all over her erstwhile empire than with a portrait like Sargent’s of Henry James, which encourages you to ...”

“... of Corinth with their image of Pegasus – gaining acceptance outside local or regional markets. Alexander the Great, who struck drachms on the Athenian weight standard, made that standard universal, while his conquests monetised the Persian Empire as far as Central Asia, so that Greek traditions eventually became hybridised with those of the Indian ...”

“... it. The Athenians guarded their citizenship like dragon’s treasure, and the kings who succeeded Alexander had subjects not citizens. This fixity of citizenship, its exclusivity, formed the hard core of their self-identification. To have two patriae, to be a Roman and also an Athenian, a Gaul or a Samaritan, was only made conceivable by the Romans, who ...”

“... from black radio and the church to academic journals. Its most articulate exponent was Michelle Alexander, a professor of law and civil rights attorney who had at one time considered the comparison between Jim Crow and mass incarceration ‘absurd’. In her study The New Jim Crow (2010), she argued that the new version differed from the old only in ‘the ...”