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“... on translation work – Henri Charrière’s Papillon, various books by Beauvoir, a biography of Charles de Gaulle – as he plugged away at the series, now just for Macmillan. In time, the Aubrey-Maturin books became a cult property. Iris Murdoch and John Bayley were fans, and every now and then a laudatory notice would appear in the TLS or the LRB, for ...”

“... Molly​ Keane’s gloriously camp novel, Good Behaviour, begins with the narrator, Aroon St Charles, a 57-year-old survivor of the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy, murdering her aged mother with a rabbit mousse. She doesn’t choke on it: Aroon has made sure that the quenelle in cream sauce is perfect, with ‘just a hint of bay leaf and black pepper, not a breath of the rabbit foundation’, the mousse irreproachable ‘after it has been forced through a fine sieve and whizzed for ten minutes in a Moulinex blender ...”

“... from Russia into Britain, met her husband, the seventh duke, at a dog show; she was exhibiting her fox terriers and he was competing with his Clumber spaniels, named after his estate in Nottinghamshire. After their marriage in 1889 they led almost entirely separate lives: he devoted himself to Anglo-Catholic ritualism and travelling the world with the animal ...”

“... would appear. Looking back at the notes I made, I see that Elwes and Lucan’s other close friend Charles Benson emphasised Lucan’s heavy drinking at the time, and his dark, brooding mood, and signs of instability. Drink might easily have made Lucan lose control with the bludgeon, having perhaps first attacked Sandra Rivett with his gloved hands. Elwes told ...”

“... for attacking the Whig interpretation of history without naming ‘a single Whig except Fox, who was no historian, or a single historian save Acton, who was no Whig’. This points to a larger unsteadiness about the object of Butterfield’s criticism, an unsteadiness that was to be reproduced as a tension running throughout his career. In the ...”

“... proximity to the holy and to absolution. Two-thirds of the way through the book, we come across Charles Keating, who is ‘now serving a ten-year sentence for his part in the Savings and Loan scandal – undoubtedly one of the greatest frauds in American history’. At the height of his success as a thief, Keating made donations (not out of his own ...”

“... name. Other reviews I’ve seen have been pretty much raves. ‘Whooooosssh! What a trip,’ says Charles Spencer at the Telegraph: ‘it is an absolute blast. Over more than 500 pages, its narrative only rarely fails to grip.’ According to John Walsh in the Independent, ‘the 500-plus pages of Life throb with energy, pulsate with rhythm and reverberate ...”

“... turns to the economy and politics. Arguing with relatives who get all their information from Fox News is as much fun as driving nails in with your head. Transforming once reasonable human beings into gullible idiots is one of the biggest businesses we have. One could call it our chief national product. To make someone unlearn everything they’ve ever ...”

“... turning up the music so that her screams could not be heard and putting his hand over her mouth. Fox News calls her a ‘loon’ (‘She may very well believe everything she’s saying. That is one of the signs of lunacy, believing something that isn’t real’); Senator Orrin Hatch says she is clearly ‘mixed up’; Donald Trump Jr tweets a crude drawing ...”

“... and apologists. Hitler’s American admirers included Henry Ford, William Randolph Hearst and Charles Lindbergh. General Motors, DuPont and IBM did business with the Nazis. So did MGM. It’s no shock to see democratic politicians cosying up to Saudi autocrats, or Rupert Murdoch or the Walt Disney Company ingratiating themselves with China’s ...”

“... as is evidenced by the volume of petitions and meetings against them, and it extended from Charles James Fox and the Whigs, and the intellectual Jacobins, to the popular societies. When Thelwall complained that Godwin, in renouncing all active agitation, proposed that the public mind was to be transformed ‘by ...”

“... Since the BBC is far more likely to report, for example, on climate change rather than, as Fox News might, on crimes committed by immigrants, its agenda is perceived in the US as liberal-leaning. This perception is bolstered by the rebroadcasting of the BBC on public radio stations, whose audiences tend to be liberal. The BBC is now, not ...”

“... to the other – such as Alan Montefiore, who contributes a useful introduction to this book, and Charles Taylor – is perhaps chiefly important for the evidence it affords of deep-seated resistance to mutual understanding. Vincent Descombes’s new book is therefore timely, particularly as it is the most comprehensive and the most philosophically acute ...”

“... theory text called Lacunosities. The drug they want to corner the market in, Glow, is made out of fox poo – more precisely, its active ingredient is a flower that’s psychoactive only once a fox has digested it – and has become a hit on the London rave scene. Eventually, Raf blags his way into Lacebark’s London ...”

“... less malevolent forms, from Pinocchio’s childish hunger to the sinister avarice of the cunning Fox and Cat, who, as in Disney, pop up at every opportunity to lead the puppet astray. But in the book the Fox and Cat are murderous, not simply venal. At one point, they set upon Pinocchio in disguise, trying to steal the ...”