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“... hardwood trees and African smallholdings. Out here it’s the same old Natal I knew as a boy, a green, untidy place where everything grows too easily and where you have to watch out for snakes, a world through which bare-footed Africans trek vast distances along dusty roads. Just fifty miles from Durban you find a patient acceptance of hardship which, to ...”

“... is a Byronic Luddite, with a sneaking sympathy for Arthur Scargill’s pugnacity; now he is a ‘Green’, a true conservative determined to conserve the land of Britain against the assaults of oil magnates and Mr Buchanan-Smith, the Minister for Energy. (This January he has also twice denounced Macmillan for being soft on Russia: the only politician he has ...”

“... and left the books). The Halls which had once had High Tables were wrecked. The lawns remained green, but no croquet or cricket was played. Now academics who suffer from low salaries, high inflation, set books not arriving this year till the third term, are plagued also by memories of the Good Old Days. At the University of Nairobi, where I taught ...”

“... stood on the table, a mute witness to a mad confidence in chance, in forgiveness, in life.’ Nan Green, a nurse with the International Brigade, watches a soldier’s lips regain colour as her blood is piped directly from her veins into his. Sylvia Townsend Warner visits the public letter-writers’ booths, ‘where men and women whose faces bear the ...”

“... Elton leafing through A la Carte as a substitute for actual cooking, and Emma consulting Elizabeth David for instruction in the matter of marrow-bones. Wherever the daily human comedy of manners is deployed as a cloak for our brute, indispensable appetites and satisfactions, food and drink must be present or, if absent, must expect to have their absence ...”

“... a fourth dimension, splendour That calls the child with white ideas of swans    Nearer to that green lake Where every paradox means wonder. The Mallarméan subject, though more accessible than in ‘Le vierge, le vivace et le bel aujourd’hui’, is every bit as immobilised; notice in the following lines Merrill’s ‘always’, the bell-jar dropped ...”

“... wet-dream – The Martian School, The Metaphor Men. Who are they? Christopher Reid, perhaps? David Sweetman? Norman MacCaig? Philip Larkin? Seamus Heaney, perhaps? Doesn’t Heaney’s description of a lobster –articulated twigs, a rainy stonethe colour of sunk munitions –vie with Raine’sscraping its clawslike someone crouchedto keep wicket at ...”

“... ritual: the project of ritual is to make time stand still, as it has apparently stood still in David Rodinsky’s room in the Princelet Street Synagogue since the day, twenty-odd years ago, when he disappeared. (See Tale No Five, ‘The Solemn Mystery of the Disappearing Room’; see also Patrick Wright’s account of Rodinsky’s room in the LRB of 29 ...”

“... successfully) and his lawyer friend Cesare Previti (largely unsuccessfully). As for David Mills, one wonders what other revelations wait to be retrieved, by journalists or historians, from the dimly lit world of the two Mr Bs. In the autumn of 2005 Berlusconi’s coalition lagged behind the centre-left by ten electoral points. His opponents, who ...”

“... gestures, glazed irony and so on. But for Moody (b.1961), as for Jonathan Franzen (b.1959) and David Foster Wallace (b.1962), the previous generation’s experimentalism was as much a way of looking at society as a renovation of novelistic technique. Writers their grouchier teachers viewed as rebarbatively modish or futuristic struck them as fairly ...”

“... most of his readers will take to be basic human rights. We have only to look at Michelangelo’s David, carved for the revived Florentine Republic in 1504, to know what it felt like to be rid of the Medici, and to appreciate the civic spirit their dynasty had subdued with its sinister charm. Florentine civic spirit, like that of ancient Athens, was largely ...”

“... has come to a head faster than expected as a result of the Scottish independence referendum and David Cameron’s political ambition. Labour has (or had) an electoral interest in keeping Scotland in the Union. The Conservatives do not. Their loyalty to the United Kingdom is sentimental, not electoral. The practical argument against Scottish independence was ...”

“... are not the end of the book. We turn the page and read a quotation from the American novelist David Markson: ‘Or was it possibly nothing more than a fundamentally recognisable genre all the while, no matter what Writer averred? Nothing more or less than a read?’ We can take the question as referring both to the described movie and to the describing ...”

“... is an orderly city, where the schools are super-efficient, no one crosses the road until the green man shines, and the enclosures at the zoo are much too small. Marani’s gentle surrealism makes the point. The book’s plot is a more routine contraption, bolting together elements of David Lodge and Henning ...”

“... fringe groups. At the culmination of his triumphant visit to the UK last month, Modi, addressing David and a sari-clad Samantha Cameron and a 60,000-strong audience at Wembley Stadium, mentioned, in order to earn multicultural brownie points, one of the icons of the bhakti movement, Kabir, a Muslim weaver’s son, unmindful of Kabir’s distaste for bogus ...”