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“... to read Milan Kundera and Timothy Garton Ash, one would expect him to be referring them to Edward Luttwak’s Coup d’Etat: A Practical Handbook. If Trump is bent on dictatorship, doesn’t it make more sense, instead of suggesting Winston Churchill (whose bust is back in the Oval Office) as a model of resistance (‘Rather than concede in advance, he ...”

“... abruptly burst out laughing, suddenly take offence, spontaneously weep or are precipitately drunk. Edward Kuznetsov’s Russian Novel, providing as it does a sort of running commentary on Russian-ness, often throws light on that kind of puzzlement – which does not mean that it is a not a complicated and often perplexing book. At one level it is easy ...”

“... emphasis. The second half of the book gives critical readings of The Spanish Tragedy, Mucedorus, Edward II, Dr Faustus and Titus Andronicus, and it is, on the whole, less satisfactory. There’s a skimpiness and loss of subtlety suggesting haste and a looming word limit. But Hattaway is never less than stimulating. Indeed, the faults of his book are those of ...”

“... worked secretly for the CIA, while really being a double agent for the Vietcong; challenged, he said he never distorted his reports to Reuters because they were the only ones who paid him. On the broad question of whether any Reuters staff were or were not agents of the British intelligence services Professor Read, though he raises the point, is perhaps ...”

“... his own sort of creature: giant silken pussy-cat or, as he once described himself to Edward Carpenter, ‘an old hen ... with something in my nature furtive’. Gosse and Carpenter were of course all eager to know what was really going on. But Whitman was less furtive than serene: like any other big animal, he simply had his own complete ...”

“... in the use of condoms from 30 per cent to 70 per cent. Although only 2 per cent of British males said that they had had sex with a man in the past year, 40 per cent admitted to homosexual inclinations experienced exclusively before the age of 18. This suggests that bisexual play in adolescence is very common, but steady and exclusive homosexual practice in ...”

“... convenience. Its methodology is lies. An atmospheric scientist once told me that he had checked Edward Teller’s projections of the amount of fallout that would reach Americans during the years of above-ground nuclear testing in southern Nevada. The great genius had somehow left off some zeros, reducing the impact a hundred or a thousandfold, while other ...”

“... as ‘behaviourism’ was at the peak of its influence. Pioneered in the early 20th century by Edward Lee Thorndike, Clark Hull and J.B. Watson, behaviourism rejected explanations of action in terms of mysterious inner processes such as ‘thought’ and tried to explain behaviour purely in terms of the organism’s conditioning by experience. By the ...”

“... Bends, which I came across when I was researching an engraving after the Welsh artist and writer Edward Pugh, made some twenty-odd years before Telford began his work. According to Telford, the Irish politicians summoned to Westminster several times a year ‘dreaded’ the part of the journey that lay through North Wales. The stretch of the old road about ...”

“... epilepsy, hypnosis and other twilight states of consciousness in which the accused was said to be legally ‘absent’. Mad-Doctors in the Dock recapitulates elements of both, and of the work that undergirds the whole project, Nigel Walker’s Crime and Insanity in England, Vol. I (1968). Although it breaks less fresh ground than its ...”

“... In my teens​ I walked to school each day past a red pillar box on Banbury Road in Oxford, said to have been installed by the Royal Mail to ease the labours of James Murray at the helm of the Oxford English Dictionary. With a magnificent incuriosity, I never thought to wonder at the strangeness of a post box positioned to enable a dictionary – it was simply where I deposited weekly letters to my friend Marian, who lived two buses away and went to a different school ...”

“... unions in economic terms. Neither Harold Wilson’s Labour Administration, nor the Europhile Tory, Edward Heath, was capable of arresting national drift and decay. But then, at last, a saviour emerged. Like other saviours, she was an outsider, but all the more powerful for that. ‘I have only recently become a Conservative,’ declared Keith Joseph, one of ...”

“... appeared. ‘“We want to create the conditions for an Epic of Gilgamesh for the Ruthenes,” said the Professor. I tried not to gape, while he eyed me shrewdly and sipped his whisky, sure of his effect.’ I felt a bit like Thompson on reading the startlingly terse note which presents The Spirit of the Age. There the reader is informed that this is ‘an ...”

“... of most potent onions, Uncle Tom Cobbleighest winners as far as the eye can see. It ought to be said in fairness that the book is not wholly devoted to the documentation of humanity’s urge to compete in irrational undertakings. Much of it consists of presumably useful information on the wonders of nature and the fabrications of the engineer; if you want ...”

“... Road, Chelsea’ without adding for the benefit of pilgrims that, although The Vale is often said to have been a cul-de-sac in the Nineties, it hasn’t been one for (at the estimate of an erudite present-day resident, Sir Edward Playfair) the last six or seven decades. More than human influence is at work, however, in ...”