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“... do is watch it And hope that this time our side doesn’t botch it. The Secretary of Defence, John Nott, Has made a whopping balls-up in the House. The Foreign Secretary’s on the spot, Loudly accused of being short of nous. The top gun-boat exponent of the lot, A prancing lion where once crouched a mouse, Is Michael ...”

“... marriages, television sets and cartons of milk. One thinks of Garrison Keillor, David Leavitt, and John Updike, whose most luminous descriptions are located in ‘the post-pill paradise’ of pleasure, estrangement and divorce. Thus the ‘normal’, whether a word, a category or a quality, loses its Larkinesque dullness and takes on an impossibly romantic ...”

“... The Ancient Paths was not so revolutionary. It belongs squarely to a tradition dating back to John Toland’s History of the Druids. Toland, who seems to have invented the term ‘pantheism’, believed he had uncovered ‘the philosophy of the Druids concerning the Gods, human souls, Nature in general and in particular the Heavenly Bodies’, but died ...”

“... 1954) but on its ability to tell complex stories – its contributors included William Faulkner, John Updike, Jack Kerouac and Don DeLillo. In Blood in the Garden, Herring is firmly in narrative mode, and he wants to remind us what a good narrative sport basketball is.This is true for several reasons, some more interesting than others. First, the obvious ...”

“... from the past. In the opening chapter, Seth, the narrator, is roaming Manhattan on foot, as is his habit, recording everything on his machine. ‘People and places. Sidewalk smokers, lovers’ quarrels, drug deals … it was all reality, a quality I had lately begun to crave, as if I were deficient in some necessary vitamin or mineral.’ He is ...”

“... or literature in society’. And a decade ago, when controversy over the curriculum was at a peak, John Guillory added that debates about literary and artistic canons merely disguised the simple fact that they weren’t very important to anyone’s self-fashioning. By the late 1990s the humanities appeared marginal even to the universities, driven as they were ...”

“... uncharted wilds out west? No one could say. The captain packed up a massive circular tusk, a three-foot-long femur and some ten-pound teeth, carried them around for several months as he went about the tricky task of eradicating the Chickasaw nation, and finally delivered the relics, after a stopover in New Orleans, to Paris, where they confounded naturalists ...”

“... spirals through the oyster glow/ Of dawn dope and fog in LA’s/Bel Air, punted perfectly. The foot/That punted it is absolutely stoned.’ The poems in These Days, published in 1989, are more assuredly exhibitionist (‘My penis/Rises, hearing its name, like a dog.//I ought to cut it off/And feed it to itself’), but it is with 1993’s My Tokyo that ...”

“... spring of 1953, during the first ever visit by an American secretary of state to the Middle East, John Foster Dulles made a point of including Cairo on his itinerary. Eisenhower and Dulles wanted Egypt to meet the Europeans halfway, i.e. to settle for something less than full sovereignty; to give Russia the cold shoulder, i.e. to side with the West in the ...”

“... wan, sometimes wanton, according to the interplay between Humbert’s sentimentality and desire. John le Carré’s Perfect Spy, Magnus Pym, owes his training to a con man father. The only way for the child to know what is going on (Ricky Pym’s words and actions don’t tell him – on the contrary, they are monstrous mystifications) is to keep watch, to ...”

“... You might think that Trafalgar Square says it all. Its massive column surmounted by the 18-foot-high statue of Horatio Nelson, the bas-reliefs at the base commemorating his ships’ destruction of the French and Spanish fleets and the city of Copenhagen, the surrounding monuments to various imperial warriors: surely all this sums up what the Royal Navy’s command of the oceans in the 18th and early 19th centuries was quintessentially about? The greatest achievement of the second volume of N ...”

“... that fighting men must have clear roads. I do not go on the roads on bicycle, in car or on foot. Whether I am at work or at home, I just stay put.’ At the end, in bold black type, was: ‘Cut this out and keep it.’ What if one heard the news of invasion while engaged in sport? The verses by Captain Harry Graham in an earlier day may have come to ...”

“... all Conservatives were similarly opposed to doctrine and ideology. To choose just two examples, John Buchan, like Disraeli a novelist and Conservative MP, maintained in the 1920s that Conservatism was ‘above all things a spirit not an abstract doctrine’. And ten years later, Stanley Baldwin warned a Canadian audience not to change the basis of their ...”

“... She may have had an abortion which injured her health, or the jealous Nora may have put her foot down. In one account it was Joyce, not Nora, who called a halt to her career. Lucia had also been abandoned by a series of largely caddish lovers, the last of whom she thought deserved a prison sentence for the way he had treated her. It may have been this ...”

“... rebuking the sex-mad present for jeering at the platitudes of old-style courtship: ‘They had foot-kissing, we have toe-sucking. You still prefer our side of the equation?’ Again, there are sharp details (‘Tolstoy wrote in his journal: "Turgenev – can-can. Sad"’) and yet another echo of Flaubert (this time invoking a famous passage in ...”