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“... when he and my stepmother were moving house. The coins were in the top pocket of his National Service uniform, which went in the skip, along with a little glass duck that he kept retrieving but finally relinquished when we insisted it wasn’t worth keeping. It kept bobbing to the surface, and I began to feel guilty, so I saved it. Other things have found ...”

“... and scandal, Maintenant was entirely written and published by Cravan: the other contributors (Robert Miradique, W. Cooper, E. Lajeunesse, Marie Lowitska etc) are all pseudonyms. Even the advertisements bear his skewed imprint: the restaurant Chez Jourdain entices customers with the words, ‘Where can you see Van Dongen’ – the Flemish painter Kees van ...”

“... I knelt and started to pray and prayed for everybody I thought of, Brett and Mike and Bill and Robert Cohn and myself, and all the bullfighters, separately for the ones I liked, and lumping all the rest, then I prayed for myself again, and while I was praying for myself I found I was getting sleepy, so I prayed that the bullfights would be good, and that ...”

“... thistle. The poem’s starting-point is a critique of the cult of the ultimate Scots lyric poet, Robert Burns, who has become a justification in his native land for permanently excluding ideas, politics, and everything but sentiment and banal platitudes, from poetry. All his major poetry from A drunk man onward aims at an inclusiveness that resists ...”

“... ambitions, Toole wrote A Confederacy of Dunces in the early Sixties, while doing his national service in Puerto Rico. The manuscript was submitted to Simon and Schuster, where Robert Gottlieb, after dickering for two years, eventually turned it down in 1966. By 1969 Toole was an English instructor at Dominican ...”

“... reference-points have always been overwhelmingly literary. Arnold Bennett, Virginia Woolf and Robert Louis Stevenson appear in the first, short, paragraph of this book, and Auden, James and Flaubert have all made their appearance before the end of the second page. Re-reading The Uses of Literacy now, one notices that a work usually recalled for its ...”

“... means or another. Despite the many who hated him, he died in bed. For I refer, of course, to Sir Robert Walpole, prime minister from 1722 to 1742, architect of the Whig supremacy, hammer of the Tories. His long tenure of power reminds us that Britain’s much-vaunted two-party system has in the past often given way in practice to something approximating to a ...”

“... well, since the tale is in substance almost unbearably violent and cruel, a manifestation of what Robert Frost calls ‘design of darkness to appal’. The central figure, Yoshihide, is a painter, a wholly disagreeable man who loves only two things: his art and his daughter. The daughter is a Lady-in-Waiting to the Grand Lord of Horikawa, whose particular ...”

“... to the absence of the Cabinet as a stabilising force and to the politicisation of the Civil Service, especially at Number 10’. She knew she’d known what she said she hadn’t when she shouldn’t, and the morning before facing the House, agreed that she might be finished. (A colleague had dismissed Michael Heseltine as ‘the sort of chap who has to ...”

“... superior brain. The Second World War interrupted and leavened his student politics, active service providing its own kind of filter. Afterwards, he returned to university, became president of the Union, wrote a few articles on economics, inherited the college fellowship of his tutor, Robert Hall, taught (inter ...”

“... out applause and ramming it through. No wonder the Liberals, and the Pan-Africanists under Robert Sobukwe, were appalled: a room full of black people had cheered the Charter through and felt empowered in the process, but a small number of white Communists had run the thing from start to finish. The Congress was their idea, they had organised it; the ...”

“... to J.E. Cookson, more than one in five of the male population of military age went into armed service. Such a sudden burst of martial fervour can only be described as a revanche, equivalent to those in France (1792-93), Prussia (1806-7), and Russia (1812) – a heightened mood combining elements of apocalyptic despair, epiphany, catharsis, but above all ...”

“... This was certainly the case in Britain where the massive purchasing power of the National Health Service supplied an effective countervailing force to Roche. Conversely, America has virtually no control over drug prices because of its small state health-care sector. Though the country acts more vigorously in anti-trust matters, it is impotent when it comes ...”

“... appropriate bonhomie to a gentleman’s confidences: ‘You may be thinking that when Myrtle and Robert made up to each other I made fun of it, and that when Myrtle made up tome I solemnly took it all in. You are quite right.’ With a little practice, of course, one comes to respond to this respectful consideration. The cosseted reader starts to enjoy, not ...”

“... American ideology. In ‘The Purposes of American Power’ (Foreign Affairs, Winter 1980-81), Robert Tucker claims to be steering a new course between proponents of ‘resurgent America’ and ‘isolationism’. Yet for the Persian Gulf and Central America he proposes a policy of frank interventionism, since, he says, the US can ‘allow’ neither ...”