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“... and wife, to the Kremlin hospital. Bakhtin died in Moscow in 1975, aged 80. By that time his major works had been reprinted and it was starting to be realised what an original thinker he was. Through decades of terrible intellectual pettiness his ideas were in eclipse as much perhaps because they were too ambitious as because they were obviously ...”

“... a singing partnership with Chuck Mitchell, a 29-year-old university-educated American, ‘my first major exploiter, a complete asshole,’ she said, adding, ‘He liked my body, but he didn’t like my mind. He was always insulting me because he had the pride of the well-educated, which is frequently academic stupidity.’ Reader, she married him. Before their ...”

“... in April 1984. His various drafts and notes have been ‘recovered and edited’ by his colleague, John Henry Jones. The result is often as maddeningly fragmentary as Faustus itself, and it is festooned with more footnotes than a redaction of the Dead Sea Scrolls. But it has all the Empson hallmarks – the density of ideation, the abrasive wit, the marvellous ...”

“... chief medical adviser, Mansel Aylward, who had already been instrumental in the introduction of major changes to the assessments that claimants had to undergo in order to receive disability benefits. As John Pring shows in The Department, these changes – and others that followed – would ‘lead to countless deaths of ...”

“... that it is often referred to as ‘the Darwin industry’. Although based on the same sources, John Bowlby’s ‘new biography’ of Darwin falls outside the industrial mainstream. For one thing, contemporary Darwin scholarship has not usually concerned itself with conventional biographical issues. (This is not to suggest that such attention to Darwin has ...”

“... over the past decade, and particularly in those of America. If American philosophers, such as John Searle, have reacted dismissively, the same has not been true of those restless denizens of the sea of texts, the literary critics. Geoffrey Hartman’s Saving the Text, whose subtitle hopefully sandwiches Derrida between the two bastions of ...”

“... and Pig Bodine (where the effect is slangy, jivey, cartoonish); at the other end of the scale, John Braine offers us Tom Metfield, Jack Royston, Jane Framsby (can these people really exist, in our minds or anywhere else, with such leadenly humdrum, such dead names?). Saul Bellow’s inventions are Dickensian in their resonance and relish. But they also ...”

“... to the élite through an academic education and knowing the right way to behave, that keeps the major public schools going. Moreover, many of these schools have been quite successful at adapting themselves to some of the requirements of modern society. They have followed the state schools in diversifying their curricula; they have introduced girls into the ...”

“... Love and Death on Long Island, ‘currently’, according to his publicity, ‘being made into a major motion picture’, was about a snobbish, reclusive British writer falling hopelessly in love at long distance with an irretrievably straight American boy starlet, but was ‘really’ about its writer’s own love-affair with Lolita, invoking shades of ...”

“... concluded, Shapiro’s account of a year in which Shakespeare is thought to have produced four major plays divides neatly into four movements. In the winter Shakespeare’s company performs Henry IV Part 2 at court, complete with a new prose epilogue (destined to be misprinted as the second half of the epilogue it replaced) that for Shapiro constitutes an ...”

“... to, almost, the present day, each one made to stand for a particular type of donnish character: John Henry Newman (‘The Charismatic Don’); Maurice Bowra (‘The Don as Wit’); George Rylands (‘The Don as Performer’); John Sparrow (‘The Don as Dilettante’); Isaiah Berlin (‘The Don as Magus’). The scheme ...”

“... buildings erected by the first settlers, and allowed for the construction of a street grid. Six major hurricanes struck between 1776 and 1781, but the Great Louisiana Hurricane of 1812 was the worst of all, plunging the city under 15 feet of water. On Good Friday in 1788, a pious military treasurer lit fifty wax tapers in his house, and left them burning ...”

“... at any moment’. A few days later, President Trump told Reuters that ‘we could end up having a major, major conflict with North Korea.’ American atmospheric scientists have shown that even a relatively contained nuclear war would throw up enough soot and debris to threaten the global population: ‘A regional war ...”

“... not much cleverer than opera plots as told by emojis, but it is nice to think about, for instance, John Adams’s Harmonielehre as a long flight from a relentless rhythmic unison in E minor via a Wagnerian prism to an ecstatic combination of a grid and a wild and dangerous celebration of E flat major. Four years ago I wrote ...”

“... density of satirical allusion. He also admitted to missing the play of intertextuality in John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera, a satire shot through with innuendo and obfuscation: ‘I did not understand that the Scene of Locket and Peachum’s quarrels was an imitation of one between Brutus and Cassius till I was told it.’ Nothing approached the ...”