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“... be a comparable reflection on different historical content. And, naturally, since the medium of white history is writing, it would not simply be a book about the language of recollection. If it were to avoid the kind of passive associationism Husserl refers to, it would have to enact the language of recollection. Such a history, giving back to metaphor its ...”

“... fact that neither of the other major parties to the Ulster conflict shares that anxiety. But the White Paper, Northern Ireland: A Framework for Devolution, pitches the issue intelligently in speaking of the ‘responsibility’, rather than the ‘right’, of the Northern Ireland people to run their own affairs. In offering a mechanism for progressive ...”

“... Town and Table Mountain. Among those who have bought houses here are Earl Spencer, Elton John and Michael Douglas, but the oddity is that, while you might assume, as you drive through its wonderful avenues, that Constantia’s residents are nothing if not respectable, you’d be dead wrong, because not only did Mark set himself up in palatial style here but ...”

“... civilisation’, a concept endorsed by Eisenhower in 1952, shortly before he entered the White House. Catholic-Protestant reconciliation underpinned the Christian Democratic idea that, as the Italian politician Alcide de Gasperi put it, ‘Christianity lies at the origin of this European civilisation.’ Faced by the threat of atheist communism from ...”

“... man’, of ‘Through the Night’, the first section of which ends: ‘The pale green leaf clings white to the lit night/and shakes a little on its stiff, tense twig’ (where only the word ‘little’ is not a monosyllable). I find him browsing along the seam of self and world, like a painter, or like a European poet, not unlike Montale or Pasternak, the ...”

“... peremptory: ‘Eve he supposed had as much sense as I had and she wore no clothes at all!!!’ A white silk dress was duly ordered (Mr C. graciously agreed to pay) and arrived properly ‘high and longsleeved’ and then, ‘on the very day of the ball, was sent back to be cut down to the due pitch of indecency’. Jane’s country-mouse observations on the ...”

“... forthrightly defend American empire as an exercise of raw power, while traditional liberals like Michael Ignatieff promote it as a way of protecting human rights against tyrannical regimes. Perhaps the leading current populariser of the idea is Niall Ferguson. Only an American empire, he insists, can secure order in a dangerous, unruly world. He does not ...”

“... are the claims made not only by those who run supermaxes but by army doctors, the Pentagon, White House lawyers, the Department of Justice and the president of the United States: ‘We do not torture.’ ‘Our practices are humane.’ ‘The United States operates a safe, humane and professional detention operation at Guantánamo.’ At Pelican Bay ...”

“... If​ universities had been an invention of the second half of the 20th century,’ Michael Dummett wondered in his last book, The Nature and Future of Philosophy (2010), ‘would anyone have thought to include philosophy among the subjects that they taught and studied?’ Dummett’s anxiety wasn’t whether philosophy could survive at a time when the value of a university education is gauged in increasingly reductive, economic terms ...”

“... edition, with a translation in similar rhythms opposite the Russian. Equally valuable are Michael Harari’s Russian plus English translation of the poems written between 1955 and 1959, published in the same paperback with Manya Harari’s translation of Pasternak’s Essay in Autobiography. As Craig Raine points out in a witty and penetrating ...”

“... not have to be a corpse (‘I’m asleep, you say, possibly dead’) and also indicates a debt to Michael Longley, who wrote a similar poem about Lowry’s painting. Whereas the vertical man was supposed to carry out dynamic acts of construction, the horizontal man is open to sober acts of reconstruction and it is the latter category which dominates A Word ...”

“... He sent this to the newly appointed Fullerian Professor of Chemistry at the Royal Institution, Michael Faraday. Faraday replied immediately: Pickersgill’s report had ‘greatly excited’ his curiosity, not least because ‘the meteor or whatever else it might be’ had been witnessed by ‘men of philosophical & correct habits of observation’. Would ...”

“... publishing is in denial of diversity. A topic as basic as the creation of life is racialised: ‘white women believed that motherhood was both original and endlessly interesting; a form of cultural narcissism.’ At a commissioning meeting ‘two non-fiction debuts are given the green light with almost indecent eagerness – one, a book on new ...”

“... and a love story’. Opening Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes we read, inside the front cover, white on black in Barthes’s handwriting: Tout ceci doit être considéré comme dit par un personnage de roman. What follows is text and pictures, a fractured autobiography, a dictionary of personal themes, arranged alphabetically. A fiction? Not ...”

“... for the Isle of Dogs, that unlucky swamp, were shredded for the construction of a shelf of towers. Michael Heseltine, a wild-haired, mad-eyed visionary (Klaus Kinski to Margaret Thatcher’s Werner Herzog), pushed Docklands across the Thames to the East Greenwich Peninsula, Bugsby’s Marshes. The obsessive, neurotic and delusional Millennium Dome concept was ...”