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“... except in one sense. There is a long, old and dramatic human struggle against viruses. Hollywood may have smothered it in melodrama, but the enemy is real enough to draw virologists to the movie – Dorothy Crawford refers to it in her introduction – and to contribute to the brittle atmosphere of the Royal Society conference. It was like a meeting of ...”

“... the mind of the child sitting behind me (at an 11 o’clock show at a multiplex in Brooklyn on 3 May, the earliest possible viewing for a member of the general public) for several months before the film’s opening, at least. Perhaps six years old, the child showed in its involuntarily murmured comments a burnished precognition of the film’s various plot ...”

“... guide in a historical reconstruction of the old Midwest for tourists; his two mates from work, who may have had more to do with his accident than they are saying; an extraordinarily patient and sympathetic nursing aide who seems to have had another life of some kind; and the writing doctor, intrigued by this rare instance of Capgras syndrome induced by an ...”

“... interests, to parochialism and, when big issues or money are involved, to hijacking. That may not make it any worse than what we now have, but it won’t make it a whole lot better. Bogdanor’s description of the political philosophy of individualism as ‘cutting power into pieces’ may be well chosen; but to ...”

“... relating to the Second World War), exceptional rather than representative. In other words, Corbyn may be atypical, but his views aren’t extraordinary. He is manifestly not a revolutionary – whatever the papers may say – and only in a highly circumscribed sense can he even be called a ‘radical’. While it’s true ...”

“... is knowledge?’ they are interested in knowledge itself; studying the verb ‘knows’ may or may not be a step along the way. Their answers take the form of what the metaphysician Cian Dorr calls ‘identifications’, attempts to define the essential nature of knowledge by completing the Platonic formula: ‘To ...”

“... And he may be thinking,’ we read in Berta Isla, Javier Marías’s last novel but one, published in Spanish in 2017, ‘that, basically, he belongs to the category of people who don’t see themselves as protagonists, not even of their own story … who discover halfway through that … their story will not merit being told by anyone, or only as a fleeting reference when recounting another person’s more eventful and interesting life ...”

“... multiplicity of first-person narratives. And the ‘I’ of The Newcomes, for instance, though he may deceive you into thinking him fixed, is a very tricky device, at once a dramatis persona and Chorus and ‘the novelist’, who finally recedes and is seen receding by a different narrator. These pertinent but awkward instances are ignored by Mr ...”

“... and since, are simply not tenable. The results of the action and subsequent military operations may within Britain have given tremendous support to the Thatcher Government, but have left an expensive legacy in the form of Fortress Falklands, now known to be causing a general distortion of Britain’s defence policy. They have resulted in circumstances where ...”

“... and represented faithfully enough the main current of cultivated thought of their day.’That may, however, be a little too diminishing, or at least it fails to account for the journal’s novelty and impact. The periodical culture of the first half of the 19th century had been dominated by stately quarterlies, led by the Whig Edinburgh Review, founded in ...”

“... another. The London Review will therefore have to be very much aware of the New York Review. We may on occasion publish some of the same writers and review some of the same books, and we shan’t always be straining to make our coverage different or complementary. But it will not be hard to tell which journal is which. The obvious difference will relate to ...”

“... blame Lord Bragg for his confusion: when Smith took over the post from Virginia Bottomley in May 1997, he was officially in charge of National Heritage, a department which had subsumed the Arts after the 1992 election. In the old days – who can forget Colin Moynihan? – Sport was a sub-directory of Education, and Media was nowhere. And just to ...”

“... the critic as well as the biographer. They show how unlike temperaments of near-equivalent talent may be drawn together by unanimity of literary principle. This unanimity should therefore be worth looking into, especially in the case of work like Philip Larkin’s, always more reserved and elusive than it seems. I want to consider his writing in juxtaposition ...”

“... amatory and alcoholic excess. We never quite got the hang of each other, code-wise. I think he may have been disappointed at my failure to respond in kind with ‘Hey, ma MAN!’ or ‘You betchar-ASS!’, professional courtesies not often heard by the banks of the Trent. For my part, I had some difficulty in understanding his general observations on life ...”

“... second instalment sets him off on what turns out to be an equally frustrated pursuit of power. It may seem curious that we are being asked to regard a man of such dazzling achievement as repeatedly failing in his aims, and at this stage we can only speculate about what he will be pursuing and not catching up with in Volume III. However that ...”