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“... The Twittering Machine (2019), which argues that the compulsive qualities of social media – its hall-of-mirrors narcissism, the dopamine hit of likes, clicks and follows – are used to manipulate our ‘fantasies, desires and frailties’ for profit. Participating in social media is to risk developing sadistic and self-harming forms of behaviour, since ...”

“... in front of a wildly enthusiastic crowd of 13,000. Marine Le Pen could only dream of filling a hall that big. Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the leading candidate of the left, held a rally at the same time, also in the Paris suburbs, and attracted an audience a third of the size. There were many more young people – most of them men (and many maskless) – at ...”

“... of the kingdom, is 32. Across the peninsula, the majlis, the tribal equivalent of a fractious town-hall meeting, has been reduced to a perfunctory ceremony, if not abolished. Saudi petitioners no longer throng through the royal gates on Tuesdays and Fridays to share a meal with their leaders. The new rulers appear to their public on ubiquitous billboards, but ...”

“... more boyish, with descriptions of the ‘wild dark-grey trousers’ of Cambridge, with paeans to Rupert Brooke, with bubbling appreciations of not very good poetry. He is an émigré, and unmistakeably happy to be at work building his name: this happiness is what finally convinces us that he truly didn’t miss all that White Russian money, gone up to heaven ...”

“... cultural change in his party. An intense-looking middle-aged man on the other side of the lecture hall became agitated as she spoke. ‘Stupid cow,’ he hissed. The man had asked the first question of the evening, about the Conservative position on European integration. Letwin had replied that he was happy to discuss it but hoped not to do so all night. In ...”

“... their balladry. Housman was more interested in traditional ballads and, like Eliot, in music hall, than in art song. Parker mentions the publication of Child’s English and Scottish Popular Ballads between 1884 and 1898 as part of the new national conversation, though not William Allingham’s earlier anthology of British ballads, a copy of which ...”

“... a novel that invokes Cyril Connolly’s dictum in Enemies of Promise about the pram in the hall – as ‘a toy for her lover’. In Hazzard’s fiction there are very few children, and the ones who do appear are not particularly rewarding. But they are not the enemy. The enemy is the person who sees others as playthings. The enemy is the writer.At the ...”

“... whom it labels beasts and wants ‘nailing’. I wonder if in the seminar room of Oxford’s Rupert Murdoch Professor of Communications such tactics are the subject of academic discussion: ‘Naming and Shaming: Rebekah Wade on Circulation Boosting, Its Postures and Proprieties’. 5 August. I saw Alec Guinness two days before he died. Though the papers ...”

“... is a word you often hear from XR members, and it has many inflections. For Rupert Read, who teaches philosophy at UEA and is a spokesperson for XR, ‘spiritual’ is shorthand for changes in human subjectivity that will enable a ‘massive shift of consciousness’ towards a ‘networked view’ of our place in rich ecologies alongside ...”

“... suspect that my images of it were imprinted on my mind within minutes of moving in.The entrance hall, which was big enough to contain a large fireplace, had probably been designed to be used as a breakfast-room. The first thing seen on coming in was a statue two-thirds life-size, a wood carving of a helmeted guardsman with a shield and spear standing on a ...”

“... will to defend ourselves; nor was there any, a year ago, to prevent the powerful American magnate Rupert Murdoch from taking over two-thirds of the press in what used to be his own country. There are moments and areas where it still seems reasonable to promote cultural nationalism, if not positive xenophobia.Meanwhile the American nuclear bases – or, if you ...”

“... proposed ‘curved glass walls’ of the ‘civic pleasure palace’ of the coming Hackney Town Hall, Wright conjured the excesses of Trump Tower in New York City. Intimations of the man himself. His boundless ambition and gambler’s belief in magic.A smudged deadbeat left over from the Reagan era … and propped up in a temporary kind of way by ailing US ...”

“... Lytton Strachey’; Housman with ‘champagne bottle shoulders’ and a cap ‘like a tea cake’; Rupert Brooke in open shirt and flaming tie (Arthur: ‘He would have been much more attractive to me with cropped hair and in evening dress’); Wells looking ‘fat, brown and perky’; Chesterton ‘enormous, streaming with sweat, his hair dripping’; Arnold ...”

“... that charmed contributors. Rhythm was often uneven, but at its best published poems by Rupert Brooke and drawings by William Rothenstein and Picasso. D.H. Lawrence called it ‘a daft paper, but the folk seem rather nice’ and gave them a story for free.Lawrence was 28 and about to publish Sons and Lovers when he asked to call on the Rhythm ...”

“... overlapped: I became fascinated, for example, with the long World War One sequence in Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness. I read up on butch lady ambulance-drivers at the Western Front. But the world had not yet retracted to a grey, dugout-sized, lobe-gripping monomania.Then, starting in my thirties, things seemed to intensify. I was in England ...”