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“... The visual package in this book might once have been marketed to showcase a selection of poems by Robert Frost. The text is calm and informative, and quietly redundant – like Norman Mailer’s overwrought rhetoric polyfilling a collection of Marilyn Monroe pin-ups. Guiltily, we thirst for something wilder, more fearful. Though, in fairness, several ...”

“... Lawrence found in him the combined perfections of the finest Classical statues, and Benjamin Robert Haydon wrote as enthusiastically about him as he did about the Parthenon Marbles. Having taken separate moulds of all parts of Wilson’s body, Haydon conceived of a bolder plan and had him enclosed in a box into which he poured seven bushels of plaster of ...”

“... in Britain, where, as a South African, he is banned from TV, but bigger than Springsteen or Michael Jackson in France). What would Danton have thought of the Revolution being commemorated by a left-wing South African singing Zulu rock in the South Pacific? Perhaps it’s best we don’t know. One longs, at times, for the more considered attitude of Mao ...”

“... the morning before facing the House, agreed that she might be finished. (A colleague had dismissed Michael Heseltine as ‘the sort of chap who has to buy his own furniture’. But Heseltine has money. And his hair. On his angry exit through Number 10, he stopped in the lavatory to arrange it, before emerging a free and in Thatcher’s eyes dangerously ...”

“... of the Union, wrote a few articles on economics, inherited the college fellowship of his tutor, Robert Hall, taught (inter alios) the undergraduate Anthony Wedgwood Benn, and entered Parliament in 1950 as MP for South Gloucester. It was a swashbuckling rise by a young man full of glamour. ‘I am more fond and proud of that young man than I can put into ...”

“... In the Economist of 27 May 1978, details were published of a secret report by a Conservative Party policy group on the nationalised industries. Each industry would be allocated a minimum rate of return on capital; managers who failed to achieve this target would be sacked. The report, drafted by the MP Nicholas Ridley, recognised that the pressures to economise would inevitably threaten management-union conflict ...”

“... most ramified of all the novels, the one with the most varied aspects to explore, as was shown in Michael Holquist’s Dostoevsky and the Novel and by Richard Peace’s remarkable examination, in Dostoevsky: The Major Novels, of its catacomb of religious symbolism and clash of hidden dogmas. It is a quarry for quite separate lines and kinds of study, like a ...”

“... when ‘each church recognised the catholicity and independence of the other.’ No easy matter. Robert Runcie, the Archbishop of Canterbury, writes in Old Catholics and Anglicans about the difficulty of trying to be both catholic and independent. But that is what Baxter claimed to be – and thought the Church of England should be. N.H. Keeble has ...”

“... pure style aims to express the inexpressible. Commenting on Czerniawski’s sympathetic artistry, Michael Irwin has noted that while Milosz’s translations of Rozewicz appear ‘irreducible’, Czerniawski improves on them by his daring elisions and sharp intelligence. The result is a poetry of ‘absolute transparency’, and some Polish reviewers have ...”

“... is well-known. A few belong to both categories; those in the second include Leonardo da Vinci, Robert Boyle, Isaac Newton, Victor Hugo; others, however, are nonentities. The temptation to dismiss the list out of hand is, as the authors agree, almost irresistible. They have, however, succeeded in establishing to their satisfaction that, apart from the ...”

“... the magazine’s new readership (we have to make do with a single observation made on a train by Michael Heath); it peters out badly in a classic ‘cont. p94’ fashion; and is in places very slapdash. For instance, Marnham’s key theory of the gear-change in Ingrams’s character – a boozy, ribald funster who in 1967 went off the sauce and emerged a ...”

“... demonstrating the disruptive effect of war on Early Modern society which has been elaborated by Michael Howard and other historians. Ashton doesn’t examine the implications of the change in policy from war to peace after 1629. He ignores the two peace treaties of 1630, and the Goa treaty of 1635, which marked a new turn in foreign and trading ...”

“... hearing the word “hypersonics”,’ one official remarked to an industry sponsored conference. Michael Griffin, undersecretary of defence for research and engineering, a hypersonics enthusiast, has spoken of the need for ‘maybe thousands’ of hypersonic weapons. ‘This takes us back to the Cold War,’ he announced cheerfully, ‘where at one point we ...”

“... A gap of fifteen years between sections seems to set the mesh of the net too wide.In Seven Up!, Michael Apted chose a group of seven-year-olds and returned to his interview subjects at intervals of seven years. In 20 Sites n Years, a different sort of documentary project, Tom Phillips set out in 1973 to take pictures of twenty London streets on ...”

“... Euripides’ play so compelling. In Shakespeare and Classical Antiquity (reviewed in the LRB by Michael Neill, 19 March), Colin Burrow described the way Seneca’s blood-soaked play about Medea haunts not only Macbeth, King Lear and The Tempest, but even A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Seneca tilts the audience’s response towards not pity or empathy but ...”