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“... What really matters, I suspect, is that Nya is for him something to hold onto, like the novels of Edward Upward, which he also defends for their historical interest, relishing for example in The Spiral Ascent the word and the concept ‘poshocrat’. Like all Bagshaw-type historians, both Kermode and Cobb delight not only in the objects but in the attitudes ...”

“... finds him in Operational Research for the Air Force. He comes out of this experience an angry young man, shocked by the waste of lives in what he sees as senseless bombing of cities, and equally by official obtuseness in failing to accept measures that could have reduced the casualty rate among air crews. This chapter is followed by one about Frank ...”

“... was still obliged to cook the omelettes, since her husband would accept them from nobody else. Edward Garnett, Conrad’s literary adviser and intimate friend from early in his career, observed that his ‘ultra-nervous organisation appeared to make matrimony extremely hazardous’. The novelist was in fact subject to long bouts of depressive illness, and ...”

“... for puritans? Mr Murphy’s subject index has an entry reading: ‘Sexual abstinence of Irish young people ... 528’. Alas, page 528 has not a word about this ...”

“... to look like Monaco, or Portofino. Former President Gerald Ford – whose son acts in the soap The Young and the Restless – has once appeared as himself. So, too, has Henry Kissinger. At a charity ball in Denver, Joan Collins wafts up to Kissinger with the greeting: ‘Henry, I haven’t seen you since Portofino.’ In the most far-reaching words of his ...”

“... is that they contain two meanings. For instance, in Spring (1563), the head and shoulders of a young man is represented by many spring flowers. The particular meanings of man and flowers are not as meaningful as that there are two, instead of the usual one. Further, what is exciting is not the two meanings but the relationship between them, the gap and the ...”

“... but themselves. The relationship is the same in kind, though not in degree, as that between the young Israeli fighter and the parents who went, unresisting, into the concentration camps. The Six-Day War of 1967 represented a watershed: after it, reliance on Pan-Arabism was replaced by a flowering of Palestinian nationalism. Dimbleby supplies the necessary ...”

“... by his teeth ... He was also extraordinary in his garb, for he normally wore a jacket like a young college boy’s, never any gloves nor polish on his shoes – and yet among a thousand he would always have seemed the most finished of gentlemen. His voice was shrill – even strident, and nevertheless it was modulated by the drift of his thoughts with a ...”

“... lines of the 1970 one which led to the formation of the Provisionals. No one knows better than the young Northern Sinn Fein leadership that the Party is nothing without the IRA. New tactics and methods were also hammered out. The IRA, which has about five hundred members, more than half of them in the North of Ireland, was purged as much as possible of ...”

“... is mentioned just in passing for his ‘refined rhetorical studies’; Jameson, together with Edward Said, is attacked for holding that Derrida’s method leads to the avoidance of historical issues; Foucault is prised apart from Derrida despite the efforts of Frank Lentricchia to assimilate them to one another in their ‘understanding of history’. In ...”

“... Edward Thomas​ called the approach to Oxford by train ‘the most contemptible in Europe’. There’s no view to speak of, and the station is a big shed with lots of glass and cheap detailing: blue pillars and PVC fascias. The city’s relationship to the railway, like its relationship to the world, is arrogant but insecure, high-minded but petty ...”

“... knew their limitations. After being absorbed into the art-world mainstream, under the patronage of Edward Steichen, he began to make a play of them. One page of Naked City (1945), his first collection, displays a pure black rectangle. A reproduction of a fully developed sheet of blank photographic stock, it is captioned: ‘This is unexposed film of Greenwich ...”

“... of Saki is published explicitly for children – Saki’s stories could certainly be read by young people, but only by the kind who relish the earlier versions of fairy tales, those in which Red Riding Hood is eaten, and Cinderella’s stepmother decapitated with the lid of a trunk – and proposes a candidate for Saki’s heir by way of its ...”

“... of that other world?’ Perhaps every person here, ‘man or woman, it doesn’t matter, old or young’, has already committed suicide. For nearly two decades, Grossman has been turning over in his mind the possibility that Israel, miraculous nation as it likes to see itself, might in fact be a moribund state. ‘In order to maintain culture, and ...”

“... and which represents a smaller but no less striking solution to the same challenge. Pippa, a young silk-mill worker, begins the poem springing out of bed with her annual day’s leave before her: ‘How must I spend my Day?’ She decides to pick a path through her town that will bring her close to a number of locals whose various happy situations she ...”