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“... and low taxation, many of its elderly members – and some of its politicians – have long held to a more cautious ethos of middle-class respectability, restraint and downright frugality. In theory, these Conservatives wished to roll back the restrictions of the socialist state; in practice, many of them reckoned that wartime rationing had been good ...”

“... a road novel midway and ends with a sloppy orgy in the Texas desert. The ever ironical narrator, David Bell, is fond of making statements like ‘I was an extremely handsome young man,’ and worships at the altar of Burt Lancaster: ‘Burt in the moonlight was a crescendo of male perfection but no less human because of it.’ ‘I don’t think my first ...”

“... from government: from the government, that is, of the rump UK, minus Scotland. The reason is that David Cameron, attempting to outflank the SNP during a midwinter silly season offensive, has managed to provoke Scotland’s first minister, Alex Salmond, into a daring dash for independence. Salmond is not – as the English fail miserably to understand – an ...”

“... as a uniform group, language writers soon became the subject of philippics and dissertations. What held their work together (besides personal acquaintance) was its apparent opacity, its resistance to the usual ways in which we make sense of poems. In Unoriginal Genius, her latest book, Perloff explains that language writers wanted to oppose ‘individual ...”

“... had all a traveller could wish in respect of the sublime and beautiful, it was Europe that ‘held forth the charms of storied and poetical association’. The FWP guidebooks were trying to put this right. Like Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, they were a ‘declaration of American cultural independence from the Old World’. ‘If the informant happened to ...”

“... supplies, said little had arrived. Children rolled up their shirts to show their scars. Relatives held out pictures of their dead. Ceilings, mud walls, courtyards and doors were pockmarked with shrapnel holes. Most journalists, and indeed many of Nadir’s residents, assumed that the cluster bombs were dropped by US aircraft. They were not. Shortly after the ...”

“... purged. Even in the Hollywood years, some indelible poshocracy remained. On making friends with David Hockney, in LA in the 1960s, Isherwood enthusiastically exclaimed: ‘Oh David, we’ve so much in common; we love California, we love American boys, and we’re from the North of England!’ Parker adds: ‘As Hockney ...”

“... possible personal embarrassment. But here was something different. In place of the revelation of David Mellor’s bedroom attire came a drip-drip of inane yet telling details of purchases from John Lewis, which didn’t interrupt politics as usual so much as reconfigure it altogether. That Ed Miliband was revealed as the most frugal member of the ...”

“... on to Coleridge, Chaucer, Fielding and Petronius, and then had a go at Proust, Mann, Boswell and David Hume. He took a turn through French literature then doubled back to the English Romantics. He read Cicero and Virgil, Gibbon and Congreve, Goethe and Nestroy, Machiavelli and Hobbes, Gerard Manley Hopkins and Thomas Hardy, Mikhail Sholokhov and ...”

“... of the ‘third sex’. Hall was influenced by the work of the turn of the century sexologists who held the essentialist view that biology is the cause of homosexuality. One of them was Havelock Ellis, who wrote an ‘opinion’ published with The Well of Loneliness. Stephen Gordon is born ‘a narrow-hipped, wide-shouldered little tadpole of a thing’: her ...”

“... esoteric. (One of the most prominent figures missing from Finkelstein and McCleery’s Reader, David Scott Kastan, has riffed on ‘New Criticism’, ‘New Historicism’ and ‘New Bibliography’ to dub his expertise the ‘New Boredom’.) The New Critics took ‘the poem itself’ where they found it, in cheap paperback reprints available even at ...”

“... since Garnett’s version (and five separate revisions of it), there have been translations by David Magarshack (1958), Andrew MacAndrew (1970), Julius Katzer (1980), Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (1990), David McDuff (1993), Ignat Avsey (1994) and, most recently, Michael Katz. Apparently there are at least ...”

“... areas, then cross-referenced their reports, following the contemporary medical wisdom which held that all diseases had multiple causes. Did groundwater interact with sunlight to produce goitre? Might a certain combination of air pressure and elevation create a cretin? In 1876, a list of the most promising theories was published; it featured forty ...”

“... agreed, among them Saleh Muslim, the leader of the PYD, the YPG’s political arm. In Britain David Richards, the former chief of the defence staff, called on Cameron to accept that Assad’s army was best placed to take the fight to IS. ‘At the moment we’ve got contradictory war aims,’ he told the BBC. ‘We want to deal with Isis but we also want ...”

“... his chair after only two years and devote himself to full-time popular science writing. He never held a regular academic appointment in the remaining fifty years of his life, turning his hand to broadcasting and filmmaking as well as books and journalism.Where T.H. Huxley had been a working scientist who only reluctantly embraced the role of scientific ...”