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“... occasional murdered foreign student, but not too many. Where the walls are scarred with YMD (for Young Mental Drylaw), and the streets on Fridays are blustery with witty drunks, and beautiful grant-maintained schoolgirls tuck into beastly food with savage appetites. I want to have wooden shutters and specimen plants, Georgian casements (the only artefact ...”

“... what you’re going to say better than you understand it yourself’, Gilbert Ryle said of the young Bernard Williams, ‘and sees all the possible objections to it, all the possible answers to all the possible objections, before you’ve got to the end of your sentence’. Williams’s declared enemies in philosophy – ‘reactionaries’ who sweep ...”

“... and all that. I reached my limit when I got to an episode of Trashfuture and heard him discussing Michael Young’s original conception of ‘meritocracy’, something he explores at length in the book. He had to pause while his hosts pointed out that Michael Young is (drum roll) the father of Toby ...”

“... At the Party Conference following Labour’s crippling defeat in the 1983 election Michael Foot stood before the massed ranks of the faithful to account for his stewardship of the Party. ‘I am deeply ashamed,’ he began. Unfortunately for Mervyn Jones, who both loves and admires his subject and would have us dwell on other things, it is the freeze-frame of that moment which lives on ...”

“... humbled, and the horror of the bombed cities and the loss of life is beginning to be counted. The young soldiers who came back from the war are turning into loyal corporation men, eager to forget the Imperial past and to dedicate the remainder of their lives to resurgent capitalism. Ishiguro’s narrator, Masuji Ono, has lost his wife and son but lives on ...”

“... the French and the Anglo-Saxon don’t mix well ... But that’s not my fault. – Because I was young and had problems, I decided to be an interviewer. In the way that the unbalanced study psychology (I had already tried that); murderers habilitate themselves as family-butchers; the bald become hairdressers. These are our modern Beatitudes ... A kind of ...”

“... I was not myself. I was just anyone.’ The person who says ‘I’ in Michael Hofmann’s earlier poems is uncertain, diffident, angry; he seems both gnarled and youthful, like some hoary child out of Hardy, although rather better treated: Most evenings I was aphasic, incapable of speech, worn down by tolerance and inclusion ...”

“... their owners or settings, we shift from a gay bar to a movie set to a modest California home; a young man, Scott Thorson, played by Matt Damon, is taken to a Liberace show in Las Vegas, meets the great man backstage and is invited to lunch the next day. Thorson is star struck, dazzled by Liberace’s piano playing, especially when he doubles the tempo in ...”

“... Sang-hyun tries to defend his enterprise as a form of benevolence. ‘You’re just brokers,’ a young woman says. This word in turn becomes more than a little problematic when a policewoman who is trying to set up a false sale in order to catch the criminals in the act admits gloomily: ‘We are more like brokers than they are.’ The slippage seems to be ...”

“... He told me patience was a discipline invaluable to a man. And left. The day was bright, and I was young in hope, and I questioned the sun, and the sun replied: Study. Be humble. Be truthful. Aspire. And I questioned the sky, and the sky replied: Study. Be humble. Be truthful. Aspire. And night came, and the ironic moon replied with a smile: Be ...”

“... And that it may not matter what ain’t so as long as everyone else thinks the way you do. Michael Lewis, in the book the movie is based on, calls ‘not knowing’ a ‘talent’. ‘Their ignorance seems incredible,’ he says. ‘They’ in this case are traders who don’t know that sub-prime mortgages, waiting to default, make up 95 per cent of ...”

“... in a more aristocratic and accomplished manner, complete with emblematic fruit, by John Michael Wright’s c.1668 painting of James Cecil, fourth Earl of Salisbury and his sister Lady Catherine, now at Hatfield. Unhelpfully, there is no indication on the canvas as to the pear-bearing girl’s identity, and no date either. However, a modern brass ...”

“... carrying 40-watt Puerto Rican briefcases ... The sun shone all that day as it did most days, the young Mexicans were visibly fond of one another, and red spiky chrysanthemum blossoms were starting to appear on the otherwise bare colorin ...”

“... of the British debate, this is an arresting sentiment. There are ministers who also favour EMU: Michael Heseltine and Kenneth Clarke both admitted as much last November, and in that small part of his heart which can afford to rise above political calculation, Major is probably an EMU man as well, when the time is ripe, as they all say. The trouble is that ...”

“... or men mooching on street corners, Lissomely draped around fire hydrants. And then he came, This young penguin with the name of a German philosopher, Who just stood there, didn’t do anything, couldn’t do anything, A hero of early vaudeville, of flickering black-and-white Comedies, imperilled by flights of steps, by a windy world. Secret favourite of a ...”