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“... Furedi hardly engaged at all with what actually happens inside British schools. There were instead grand-looking historical generalisations – ‘in the 21st century, conservation of the past is a radical act’ – and a lot of anecdotes of the sort that make people start going on about political correctness gone mad: ‘They’re even expelling ...”

“... Mythology of the Secret Societies (1972) illuminated much, but not the movement’s origins. Now David Stevenson can claim to have clarified these considerably, in a work of creative scholarship flavoured by exceptional candour and gusto. His subtitle gives his gist. In the 17th century, such characteristic features of Freemasonry as the local Lodge ...”

“... as a highly special unity, congratulating itself on a mythic journey through two centuries to a grand point of arrival in the present. In May the Queen will open the new Parliament House in Canberra: designed by an Italian working from New York, it’s one of our more interesting public buildings since the Sydney Opera House (designed, as far as they’d ...”

“... such as Dostoevsky, who offer the deepest objections to their own belief. The parable of the Grand Inquisitor, in The Brothers Karamazov, is an unanswerable attack on the cruelty of God’s hiddenness. In my early twenties, it proved decisive. Kierkegaard writes, in Works of Love, that the true Christian preacher ‘should not hesitate, aware of the ...”

“... outside the cabinet-committee structure.’At the same time, the role of Parliament as the grand inquisitor of the nation seemed to be slipping. By 1995, the Labour MP Jack Straw was lamenting that ‘in the last six years, every serious newspaper has abandoned its straight reporting of Parliament.’ Almost overnight, a tradition that dated back to ...”

“... been dismissed. In 1937 the Nazis staged the Degenerate Art exhibition in Munich. (Salomon, David Foenkinos imagines in his novel, ‘positions herself on the side of the despised artists’.) In 1938, she submitted a piece for an anonymous fine arts competition; having picked it as the winner, the jury panicked when they discovered it was by a Jewish ...”

“... pounding the beat, up on the toes, good black notebook. Time to brood. But Dalgleish? He’s too grand somehow for Faber. Probably sponsored by C.H. Sisson at Carcanet. The right credentials. What does he write about? Obviously, the job helps: ‘his next book of poems contained that extraordinary one about a murdered child.’ Otherwise? John Betjeman in ...”

“... sociological forms of art in the Twenties and Thirties, stories like Angel Pavement and films like Grand Hotel, all showing how big cities cram together people very different who have to get on with each other. Both crowded and feeling, metropolitan and dehumanised, The Waste Land is in this sense as well as others the masterpiece of the modern. I don’t want ...”

“... little purpose. There is not much sign that Labour has learned the lesson. The new Home Secretary, David Blunkett, is in some ways the worst possible choice. From what he has said so far it is evident that there will be the same dishonesty about crime, the same boneheaded attitude to drugs, the same belief that a Labour Party just re-elected with a majority of ...”

“... an advocate, at the Oxford Union, of the birch and stocks; Chris Huhne, later energy secretary in David Cameron’s cabinet; Jeremy Hunt, the current health secretary. Johnson liked teaching and had a taste for the rough and tumble. His great day was not as a young man who worried about apartheid, or a feisty libertarian outnumbered by big French Stalinists ...”

“... of the Novel and which touched painfully on Watt’s wartime experience. Among his objections to David Lean’s blockbuster The Bridge on the River Kwai were its ignorant unrealism about the possibility of escape from the Thai railway camps and its concentration on the improbable exploits of its American hero, Shears (played by the hunky William Holden). In ...”

“... rehearsal, I call in at the cathedral, the parish church as it must have been until about 1900. A grand medley of church and state, the army and the professions, it’s an old-fashioned place too in that you’re not blitzed with information, exhibitions and outreach as soon as you set foot in the door. Here is Collingwood, Nelson’s admiral, and an ...”

“... as Philip Martin puts it. In J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace, the dodgy English professor David Lurie’s seduction of his student is bound up with his admiration for Byron’s poetry, Lara in particular.It’s easy to forget, in this context, that Byron was the same poet who could picture possible incest and a poisoning in The Bride of Abydos ...”

“... I came in the latter category. I went round to see him after Home and he said how much he liked David Storey. ‘He’s the ideal author … never says a word!’ In Chariots of Fire he shared a scene with Lindsay Anderson, both of them playing Cambridge dons. Lindsay was uncharacteristically nervous but having directed John G. in Home felt able to ask his ...”

“... overlooked (‘no detail too small’), or not noticed properly, or exaggerated, or let loose into grand feelings which were not fully to be trusted. In ‘The Map’, she seemed to disapprove of the moment when the map’s printer experienced ‘the same excitement/ as when emotion too far exceeds its cause’. She was careful not to allow that to happen in ...”