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“... stressed that Parshley should not be seen as the villain of the piece. A professor of zoology at Smith College, he was genuinely enthusiastic about Beauvoir’s book. It was the publisher, not Parshley, who insisted on cutting the text; in the end he cut 145 of the original 972 pages, or almost 15 per cent of the original. The strength of Parshley’s ...”

“... much else of worth.’ He was perfectly aware of his reputation as a cantankerous grump: when Colin Burrow reviewed his collected poems in the LRB (20 February 2014), the piece was entitled ‘Rancorous Old Sod’, which actually mitigated a harsher self-description (‘rancorous, narcissistic old sod’). He is splendidly vituperative in this poem about ...”

“... T.J. Clark, Jonathan Coe, Sionaidh Douglas-Scott, Daniel Finn, Dawn Foster, Jeremy Harding, Colin Kidd, Ross McKibbin, Philippe Marlière, James Meek, Pankaj Mishra, Jan-Werner Müller, Susan Pedersen, J.G.A. Pocock, Nick Richardson, Nicholas Spice, Wolfgang Streeck, Daniel TrillingDavid RuncimanSo who​ is to blame? Please don’t say the ...”

“... technique called Y-STR. I trained at the Leicester Mercury shortly after the double child murderer Colin Pitchfork became the first person to be convicted on the evidence of genetic fingerprinting in 1988. The Leicester-based geneticist Alec Jeffreys, who pioneered the technology, was one of the paper’s best contacts. Last year, I asked Carol Rogers, the ...”

“... after speaker attacked Clinton’s use of private email to conduct government business (which Colin Powell, as secretary of state, had also done). It was the primary reason she should go to prison: she had ‘put our national security at risk’; she had made us ‘less safe’. In the recent FBI report that criticised her lack of judgment – which was ...”

“... a choice of competing barbarians to defend its borders. In their book The Plot against the NHS, Colin Leys and Stewart Player argue that, having failed to persuade the public and the medical establishment under Margaret Thatcher that the NHS should be turned into a European-style national insurance programme, the advocates of a competitive health market ...”

“... the commanding officer in Vietnam, was asking for 206,000 more troops. Neil Sheehan and Hedrick Smith reported this leak, which was accurate and had a devastating effect on Congress and the American people. It did not come from Ellsberg, but ‘as I observed the effect of this leak,’ he recalls, ‘it was as if clouds had suddenly opened. I realised ...”

“... was never quite so cut and dried. Skim the sub rosa lit of the time (Robin Cook, Alexander Baron, Colin MacInnes) and you’re plunged into a lost river with discrete but commingled tributaries: gay, criminal, East End Jewish, upper-class drop-out, lower-class dandy; the ‘morries’ of Cook’s dodgy Chelsea set, and Baron’s Harryboy Boas, a ...”

“... When the modern reader makes the transition from merely dreaming along with Jane Grigson or Delia Smith to trying a recipe, the imperatives resume their familiar role. But this cannot have been the case with a book such as Household Management, or not for much of the time. How did the following sentence function? ‘Send [the pancakes] to table, and continue ...”

“... to resemble an etching, which is true enough, though it resembles something else even more, as Colin Harrison says in his excellent handbook to Palmer: a carved ivory. The Valley Thick with Corn is one of the most beautiful expressions of what Palmer’s son once astutely noted in his father, ‘a certain sentiment of surpassing fruitfulness’, and its ...”

“... have a benefit-cost ratio twice as high, and well below flood-prevention schemes, which, as Chris Smith, chairman of the Environment Agency, highlighted during the recent crisis, required a benefit-cost ratio of at least 8 to be sanctioned by the Treasury. And all this is leaving aside the dependence of the HS2 business case on the accuracy of the growth ...”

“... by nearly 50 per cent since 2010, revealed unpopular plans to remove youth services, Iain Duncan Smith was derisive: If you look at the successful local authorities, they are the people who have worked out what the vitally important things are that they do, and have managed to get through this process without savaging the things that really matter. My only ...”

“... cultural milieu. There was Clive, Fred Halliday, later Sheila Rowbotham got involved, and Roger Smith, script editor at the BBC. The French May erupted as we were about to launch the first issue, which had come out looking slightly miserabilist and unimaginative. It was generally felt that the cover was awful. We voted to pulp it and D.A.N. Jones, later of ...”

“... held in the 1950s by academic pundits in the West, such as Alfred Guillaume and Wilfred Cantwell Smith, who wrote general guides to Islam. The final chapters in such books invariably pontificated about how, if Islam was going to thrive in the future, it was going to have to adapt to Western ways and accommodate its outdated theology and law to modern science ...”