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“... back through his pieces for the paper, and the reviews of his books, among them a glowing piece by Paul Foot in 1986, is to know that he isn’t easily pinned down. Yet if there were laws against inciting party political hatred, Johnson would have been fined and marginalised as a red-baiter on many occasions in many countries: he is a reliable, aggressive ...”

“... snip, snip – ‘And then I left early.’ This is fitting for a performer it’s almost de rigueur to call ‘iconic’. The price of entrance is paid to receive the benison of her holy presence, not to listen to the once volatile, trance-inducing music. Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe in 1974 Smith (née Smith), who turns seventy this ...”

“... of the junta which had ruled Burma since 1962, didn’t seem very significant. Than Shwe was a man of cartoonish charmlessness and crudity, and as prime minister, Thein Sein had been his loyal sidekick, the blinking and bespectacled face of the regime at such international gatherings as it was permitted to attend. Like most of his new ministers, he was a ...”

“... Paris. He was a loner. He was also a deeply gregarious and social being. He was the most eloquent man in the America of his time. His legacy is also one of failure. It is hard to decide what part of him came first. Was the colour of his skin more important than his sexuality? Was his religious upbringing more important than his reading of the American ...”

“... he was available, film crew on standby, to take the plaudits. Whatever his manifold faults, the man was a master of credit harvesting, his hair tossing and his huff-and-puff bluster leavened with Carry On jokes: ‘Fantastic, amazing … Going through the motions, so to speak.’ Engineers and work crews, already operating on a 24/7 schedule, dreaded the ...”

“... from Viktor Shklovsky through Tolstoy, Marcus Aurelius and popular riddles of Roman times, Antonio de Guevara and the transmission of medieval tales to the age of Charles V, Montaigne, La Bruyère, Madame de Sévigné, Voltaire, to finish in Proust – all in 25 pages. In this procedure, which we could also call historical ...”

“... writing the cycle with clear intentions. In a document titled ‘Notes sur la marche générale de l’oeuvre’, he identified his subject as ‘une famille centrale sur laquelle agissent au moins deux familles’. That is, a central family and at least two collateral branches that would span the breadth of society, ‘dans toutes les classes’. He would ...”

“... popular culture who have gone furthest to take political confrontation to a perilous edge. Robert De Niro led a cheer of ‘Fuck Trump’ at the Tony Awards, and received a standing ovation. In a comic monologue, Samantha Bee buttonholed Ivanka Trump: ‘You know, Ivanka, that’s a beautiful photo of you and your child, but let me just say, one mother to ...”

“... until the century’s second great catastrophe. This is not the common view. The title alone of Paul Fussell’s enormously influential The Great War and Modern Memory (1975), for example, proclaims the contrary. So does the concluding line – ‘Never such innocence again’ – of Philip Larkin’s 1960 poem ‘MCMXIV’, invoking the summer haze, the ...”

“... Can it really be the case, for instance, that the daughter of an Irish diplomat who worked for De Valera, the teenager who was fascinated (as Object Lessons tells us) with rebel songs and martyred patriots, did not ‘talk to’ anyone about the Famine until she went, as a student, to Achill? And how true is it to say that, in turning away from the old ...”

“... thought about this for some time but my thoughts were focused when I saw Isabelle Huppert in Paul Verhoeven’s 2016 film, Elle. The film begins with a rape about which the victim, Huppert, is ambivalent. This sent the critics, particularly male critics, scuttling to and fro wondering whether it was a feminist, post-feminist or anti-feminist film, or ...”

“... told Peter Warlock that after being invited to hear ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’ (a solitary man’s expression of longing for still greater solitude) sung by a thousand Boy Scouts he set up a rigid censorship to prevent anything like that ever happening again. This is presumably the origin of Larkin’s remark that before he died he fully expected to ...”

“... sous l’oeil des Russes,’ he wrote. His own option for the second term – he was an admirer of De Maistre and Donoso Cortes – was never in doubt. In England, where Schmitt’s incandescent early manifesto for the Roman Church was edited in a Catholic series of Essays in Order, polarities were not so acute. The Cambridge of the Twenties was a sheltered ...”

“... of a Daughter-in-Law’, ‘Grandmothers’. If we are allowed ‘Trying to talk with a man’, everything vehement, and lesbian, from the poet’s last decade has been suppressed. All this matters because compilation is expensive when there are royalties to pay. Volumes like the Faber Book can’t appear often, and those that establish themselves ...”

“... the plantocracy in Saint-Domingue, James wrote a play celebrating him as an anti-colonial hero (Paul Robeson took the lead role: he had admired Louverture since he was a teenager). In 1998, Toussaint’s remains were interred at the Panthéon: he was commemorated as a ‘freedom fighter, architect of the abolition of slavery and Haitian hero’, although he ...”