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“... you a journalist?’ (their italics). Bloody-minded, I could never resist answering: ‘I hope I still am.’ The deeply ambivalent professional relations of the academy with the press are another story. But they feed the general damaging reluctance to understand that any print journalism worth reading must by the same token be writing, in its own ...”

“... rather obscured by glossing political action merely as the gauging of efficient means to ends. As Charles Taylor (the Canadian politician and philosopher, not the Liberian gunslinger) has pointed out, dousing the Vietnamese population in Agent Orange is only prima facie comprehensible as the upshot of a cost/benefit util-tot. It is better seen ...”

“... animals.’ More recently, Marjorie Perloff called for undergraduates to swear off Evian, in the hope that tap-water drinkers could afford unabridged books rather than hackneyed fragments. Nobody seems to be listening. Last year set records: even without counting the millennial gift books already piling up on remainder tables, 1999 marked the appearance of ...”

“... to escape the total domination of the first of these two categories. And the present review, I hope, does not fall squarely within the second. When Troilus, in Shakespeare’s play, finds that Cressida, whom he has identified with fidelity, is actually unfaithful, he exclaims: ‘This is and isn’t Cressid.’ He also says:             O ...”

“... Bates nestles side by side with Jonathan Swift, and Ted Hughes with Chaucer. A generation ago, Charles Lamb’s Essays of Elia would probably have been selected; nowadays hardly anybody reads Lambs essays, although teachers nervous of starting on Shakespeare with 14-year-olds are urged to ease them in with the dreary Tales from Shakespeare. If one had to ...”

“... all the time, deliberately or unintentionally. It’s a way of telling about ourselves in the hope of being recognised as what we’d like to be. I trust performances. In family snapshots, however, what is all too often apparent is a pained embarrassment about being photographed at all: the subject does not wish, or know how, to perform, and so he or she ...”

“... would have been, or just possibly was, eighty in 2014. The second child and eldest son of George Charles Patrick (‘Pat’) Bingham, the sixth earl, and his wife, Kaitlin, much was made in 1974 of his ancestry, in particular the life and character of his great-great-grandfather, the third earl. In addition to treating his Irish tenants at the time of the ...”

“... foraged for greens, communed with trees, danced in the sea and made wands. Prince Charles, visiting in 1995, enthused about Sark’s uniqueness and urged the locals not to change.What Sark has never offered is luxury. Victorian writers attributed the longevity of the residents to daily exercise, strong breezes and seaweed, as well as hard work ...”

“... a pair of models, but they ‘looked sleazy’. The artist engaged to produce the paintings, Charles Raymond, took one look and said: ‘I’ll do it with my wife.’ He recalled that during the shoot, ‘We got carried away, and [the photographer] disappeared.’ This was how the images ended up depicting a quite ordinary-looking, slightly alternative ...”

“... with inscrutable road signs’. What she seems to have in mind is something drawn by Charles Addams, homes for ghouls rather than the headquarters of what is commonly assumed to be a form of therapy. Once an analyst has completed his training he begins to hope that he will, in time, become a training analyst ...”

“... just the same but blue. I have a yellow knitted jacket, double-breasted, that I call a Prince Charles coat. Summer comes and I have a crisp white dress with blackberries on, which shows my dimpled knees. I have a pink and blue frock my mother doesn’t like so much, chosen by me because it’s longer; people of six, I think, have longer skirts, and I am ...”

“... choices filled their minds and nothing else: These are the speeches I can listen to. And The hope and love I had in fields and moors, In hills, in waters lashing round the coast. The coast of where? And where but you, O England, Which name has gathered all my hopes and loves, Changed like a dream, the land that never was And yet to which I gave my ...”

“... out by considering the strange behaviour at rugby internationals (the introduction of ‘Land of Hope and Glory’? All the Protestant Ulstermen standing to attention for ‘The Soldier’s Song’?); or the nature of money (English notes and coins, Scottish ditto, but just try passing British Linen notes south of the Tees, Welsh coins only, Northern Irish ...”

“... his business was ‘to get into touch with the common folk here, to find out what they desire, hope, or fear’. By the early months of 1891 he had formed the notion, as he wrote in Something of Myself, ‘of trying to tell to the English something of the world outside England – not directly but by implication ... Bit by bit, my original notion grew into ...”

“... of identity and selfhood among Anglo-American philosophers (I am thinking, for example, of Charles Taylor’s Sources of the Self) it seems fair to say that most philosophers today have a ‘resistance’ – Cavell’s word – to any project as immodest and self-aggrandising as ‘guiding the soul’. But something like this project was once widely ...”