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“... known as the Avenger is said to do. The lodger says to the girl who looks all too much as if she may be the Avenger’s next victim: ‘Be careful, I’ll get you yet.’ He’s referring to the game of chess they are playing, but we know a double entendre when we’re hit over the head with one. Could this lodger possibly be the Avenger? The girl’s mother ...”

“... could have predicted – its bold and comprehensive policy offer contrasting sharply with Theresa May’s grim prospectus for a grimmer Britain. No pollster could have foreseen that the contest would not after all be between statesmanlike authority and a cultish ideologue but between a hologram prime minister and a genial figure with a full and varied ...”

“... seeing shortages of medicines that people take month in, month out. A House of Commons report in May listed a few of the reasons: geopolitical factors such as the war in Ukraine, the after-effects of the Covid pandemic and the disruption of supply chains in the wake of Brexit. It also pointed to manufacturing and distribution problems (the result of a lack ...”

“... the US), Hughes damns damn near everybody. He follows the uncompromising American dictum that you may attack whomever you like as long as you attack them for being unwilling to compromise. A New York Times reviewer called the book ‘post-modern rather than high Enlightenment’, a surprising but sound judgment if we understand ‘post-modern’ as describing ...”

“... word in the text, and added a footnote on its ‘connotations’. But of course an editor may modernise without being insensitive, just as we may object to this instance without attacking modernisation per se. Similarly, modernised punctuation may be more or less sensitive to the ...”

“... is a bit surprising coming from the stately Eliot, though the experience to which he refers may in some forms be common enough. He certainly experienced it, or something that puts him or us in mind of it. If the word is used as equivalent to ‘frisson’ (and lexicographers defining frisson seem unable to avoid ‘shudder’), we can propose a debt to ...”

“... him fables about them, in order to signal and avoid an unwelcome thought. He settles on what may seem a rather narrow and self-regarding interpretation of what he calls his ‘disturbance of memory’. His doubt about getting to Athens, he says, ‘had to do with the strictures and poverty of our living conditions in my youth’. He didn’t think he ...”

“... win lower-class support for it. We might suggest that the Parliamentary leaders – whose rhetoric may in any case have been more concerned to rally their backbenchers than to dupe the commonalty – were more persuaded by their own propaganda than Trevor-Roper allows, but if so they can still be charged with irresponsible and dangerous ...”

“... by one of the characters in Kingsley Amis’s latest novel, Difficulties with girls. It may not have been the same remark, of course: but since Amis was Larkin’s close friend, and Larkin a great letter-writer, and since the words on the page served suddenly to bring back a long-past occasion, it seems possible that a series of sentences has ...”

“... at answers; philosphers after my heart will rather wish to convey the thought that while there may be no satisfying answers to such questions in certain forms, there are, so to speak, directions to answers, ways to think, that are worth the time of your life to discover.’ This characterisation of philosophy should not appear as alien as it is sometimes ...”

“... period of primitive agriculture, according to modern anthropology. Thus, one person’s golden age may well be another’s stone age. The last golden age of criticism was probably in 18th-century Europe, and was called the ‘age of reason’ and ‘the Enlightenment’ by its enthusiasts, the ‘age of brass’ by its contemporary detractors, and the ‘age ...”

“... at least the trousers, worn by so many Western female political leaders, from Merkel to Clinton, may be convenient and practical; they may be a signal of the refusal to become a clothes horse, which is the fate of so many political wives; but they’re also a simple tactic – like lowering the timbre of the voice – to ...”

“... am the Fellow with the great belly, and he my Dogge.’ No one now quite follows this joke, which may be an airy reference (to distract attention) to the Man in the Moon. What is more interesting than Falstaff’s ancient joke is his capacity to make us listen to him while he tells it. We concentrate.Falstaff can get away with this debate as to who ...”

“... He develops a thesis about the decline of leaderships and authority in Britain which may or may not be right, but which lends the book a vision and a theme. To write of post-war Britain is to enter a long-running debate over the state of the nation which began about 1960 and has continued ever since. Many ...”

“... the Perhaps Party. Superstition is one of the older religions of the Don’t Knows. For some, it may be a positive assertion of faith in supernatural forces, but for many it is a foggy compromise between knowledge and ignorance, an insurance policy that may or may not stop things going ...”