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“... was to address a party of sailors. ‘But,’ he concluded poisonously, ‘we are not here to hammer the last nail into Shostakovich’s coffin.’ At this point Radamsky has himself yelling, ‘You bastard!’, which might be one of those self-exculpatory inventions to which memoirs are prone, or might just be true. In either case it gives the lie to ...”

“... 4500 miles away. The sou-wester that bore the First Fleet past in 1788 strikes it like Thor’s hammer. Most days, ten seconds of deep breathing here is guaranteed to clear brain cells of all content, including ‘in the meantime’ depression. Back in the Café Malibu with a latte, the staff of Antipodean life, it was easier to reflect on how limited the ...”

“... of Walt Disney’s Tomorrowland. In the V-2, form and purpose were united, as with a knife, a hammer, or some other fundamental human tool. You understood what it could do. As soon as you saw a V-2, you knew what it was for. It was a tool for defeating gravity, for escaping the confines of earth.There’s more than enough here for an instructive blog ...”

“... with Augustine). Following a line of argument in the writings of Jesus’s contemporary admirer Paul of Tarsus, who never met Jesus in his earthly life but shaped much subsequent Christian thought, Augustine emphasised that humanity’s disobedience left it helpless before God’s wrath. If God chose to exercise mercy, that was his business; humanity had no ...”

“... episodes as the mass in the Vatican that never was, or the dinner in Palm Beach with Armand Hammer that finally did happen. The Prince’s many charities and trusts are worthy ventures, but they are described in a detail which is altogether excessive. And the extended sections devoted to his journeys of self-discovery, and his explorations of Eastern ...”

“... In so far as there was a shared response to Hart Crane’s poetry after his suicide in 1932, it took the form of invidious comparisons. ‘Crane had the sensibility typical of Baudelaire,’ R.P. Blackmur wrote in 1935, ‘and so misunderstood himself that he attempted to write The Bridge as if he had the sensibility typical of Whitman.’ Dylan Thomas’s poems, Randall Jarrell wrote in 1940, ‘often mean much less than Crane’s – but when you consider Crane’s meanings this is not altogether a disadvantage ...”

“... Donatello’s knight in armour – and concludes: Finally Michelangelo scored Crushing with a hammer A marble lump of dead flesh Which the sorrowing mother Supports by the arms When her son can no longer bear His own inhuman saintliness. In settling for what Charles Tomlinson would term ‘the merely human’, Staff offers a vision which resembles the ...”

“... laid brilliantly waste – and why not? – the claims to poetic greatness of the recently dead Paul Valéry, and then writing the Introduction for her second piece of fiction, Portrait d’un inconnu, of 1947. This was Tropisms made continuous and drawn out to the length of a novel: a profound and engaging demonstration of the troubling things that are ...”

“... had been eating each other long before Adam fell – which to those feeding on their Milton and St Paul was decidedly unfunny. Buckland’s contribution, Rupke suggests, has to be assessed, not against the background of European geology, but against the foreground of educational reform at Oxford. One is made a little anxious by this because there is a danger ...”

“... away from its staid traditions, running a series of headlines that wouldn’t have embarrassed Paul Dacre: ‘May unleashes fire on Europe: Keep out of our election, angry PM tells Brussels’; ‘Labour tax to hammer workers on £80,000’; ‘Corbyn’s manifesto to take Britain back to the 1970s’; ‘Corbyn engulfed ...”

“... all by the medieval poet Hafiz, who had recently been translated by the Orientalist Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall. Hafiz, who lived in Shiraz, survived the turmoil that resulted from Tamburlane’s invasion, and wrote passionate poetry about drinking and loving well into his later years; he died aged around 70 c.1389. Hailed as a Sufi mystic as well as the ...”

“... invited most of the non-Axis states to an international conference in the United States to hammer out details and design the new institutions. One of the most innovative aspects of the Anglo-American deal was the fact that it prioritised the need for full employment and social insurance policies at the national level over thoroughgoing international ...”

“... or lawyerly approach to political philosophy, ticking off useful concepts and ignoring the rest. Paul Johnson (perhaps not the most reliable witness) described her as ‘the most ignorant politician of her level that I’d come across until I met Tony Blair’, but he thought she was at least touchingly aware of her ignorance, ‘the eternal scholarship ...”

“... had predicted that US troop levels would fall to 30,000 by the end of the summer. * I heard that Paul Bremer’s first act as director of the Coalition Provisional Authority was to fire all senior members of the Baath Party, including 30,000 civil servants, policemen, teachers and doctors, and to dismiss all 400,000 soldiers of the Iraqi army without pay or ...”

“... were no leaders but they were first into the dark on Dog Fox Field: Anna who rocked her head, and Paul who grew big and yet giggled small, Irma who looked Chinese, and Hans who knew his world as a fox knows a field. Insisting that the dignity of persons is not based on intellect or achievement, Murray can be astonishingly good at expressing bodily feelings ...”