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“... is probably why her book does not attempt a full assessment of his abilities as a commander. It may be for the same reason that there is no serious exploration of the tension, which she has clearly observed, between divergent contemporary perceptions of him. On the one hand, he inspired the comment ‘an Englishman gone Italian is the devil ...”

“... his celebrated warning that ‘the popular press is drinking in the last chance saloon.’ Mellor may have meant what he said, but he was certainly not speaking for the rest of the Government. As far as the majority of his colleagues were concerned the newspapers had not even walked through the saloon’s swing doors, and Calcutt was just a device to quell ...”

“... There is already a lot of biographical writing about Orwell, including the memoir of Richard Rees and The Unknown Orwell by William Abrahams and Peter Stansky (lamed by the late Soni Orwell’s refusal of permission to quote), and, more recently, the expansive Life by Bernard Crick, at first authorised by the widow to emphasise her rejection of Stansky and Abrahams, and later de-authorised by her to indicate disapproval of Crick, who, much to her annoyance, had lawyers good enough to ensure that he was able to publish it anyway, quotations and all ...”

“... writing, the long and intricate continuities from draft to draft that we find, say, in Proust. We may guess that the seepage must take place somehow, if that’s our biographical theory, but we certainly don’t see it. We do see something other than Stendhal’s mistakes, however. We see him cruising, so to speak: not in the workshop but on the prowl. We see ...”

“... his penultimate chapter that he had occasionally got his chronology wrong)? And whatever view one may take on this, the vein of brutality and grotesquerie in Far Away and Long Ago becomes additionally fascinating in the light of Hudson’s anecdote. Whether he saw into his past, or only into his own nature, on that second day of illness, the reader is alerted ...”

“... involves a break with Deconstruction. Norris argues in this book, as he has argued before, that Richard Rorty’s formalist reading of Derrida as a dissolver of truth and objectivity is wrong: Deconstruction may expose particular areas of aporia or vertiginous bewilderment in the logic of interpretation and explanation as ...”

“... cousin to the Latin vaticinor (the Vatican is named from its site on the collis vaticanus, which may itself have got its name from the fact that seers and prophets used to congregate there). ‘Fate’ is similarly derived from fatus, the past participle of Latin fari, ‘to speak’. Prophecy is therefore performative, a speech act that does something in ...”

“... justifiably at those who had to wait for Barthes’s later work to realise he was human, but there may be some stragglers still, and this book should help them. Barthes discusses his debts to Sartre and Brecht, and the linguist Benveniste, remembers his early bouts of tuberculosis as hints of what might have been a vocation. The sanatorium, he says, was ‘a ...”

“... don’t especially like car crashes, exploding buildings and the overuse of assault weapons, you may want to stay away from the cinema for a while. Well, you could have started to stay away even before the pandemic, because it often seemed there was nothing else to see, whether the noise and violence involved superheroes or just special agents in suits. But ...”

“... of the events or issues they might indirectly represent. It was quite far-fetched to suggest that Richard Brooks’s The Professionals (1966), say, set in Mexico, was asking us think also of the war in Vietnam. The current season of Sergio Leone films at the British Film Institute, concentrating on his westerns, and especially on the first, A Fistful of ...”

“... where it came from and then try to adumbrate Khamenei’s statement. It’s important because it may be the key to the outcome of the present nuclear negotiations with Iran. Let WSWU be the number of SWUs needed to separate a feed with a percentage of uranium-235 xf – the rest being uranium-238 – into a product with a U-235 percentage xp and a remainder ...”

“... they are as dominant as the logo on a Formula One racing car. The map of Sussex of 1724-25 by Richard Budgen has the arms of no fewer than 184 subscribers, arranged hierarchically. Maps like this were surely a way of building status, items to display rather than use, like the maps that hang on walls in Dutch 17th-century interiors. They make handsome ...”

“... in either medium could achieve. Gillray’s first ambition was to be a reproductive engraver (Richard Godfrey suggests in the catalogue that he failed because he could never avoid exaggerating, if only a little). He possessed a combination of technical abilities which no modern caricaturist can match: a good grasp of anatomy, a fine way with drawn drapery ...”

“... many less serious viral infections; there is no quick way of reassuring a patient who suspects he may have the disease. (The BMJ recently carried advice to doctors on a whole new problem – the treatment of anxiety and depression among homosexuals who fear they may have AIDS.) Time alone can tell: but if you have the ...”

“... appeared on page 618; the same letter in the new edition concludes on page 816. Yet those figures may understate the extent of the transformation achieved by the new edition. The earlier edition contained 509 letters by T.S. Eliot, 37 by his first wife, Vivien, and 40 by various others. The new edition adds 195 more letters by Eliot, another 27 by Vivien and ...”