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“... need-to-tell, what John Updike has diagnosed as an urge ‘to cover the world in fiction’. Money may have been the definitive portrait of Eighties materialism, but Amis has a sly suspicion that we haven’t yet tired of reading about the things we cannot get too much of – like fame and money, sex and information. Amis’s latest anti-hero suffers from too ...”

“... was craggy, formidable, his conversation a further outlet for his aggressiveness. While he may not have talked for victory, it is said that his verbal tirades were a faithful copy of the way he wrote. Ruskin had all the social graces, as well as a fine-honed aesthetic sense which Carlyle totally lacked. ‘Airt, airt, what is it all about?’ he once ...”

“... On 23 May 1909, Jacques Deprat left France for Hanoi with his young family to start a career as a geologist in the Service Géologique de l’Indochine. His advancement had been won against the odds. His beginnings were humble, if respectable, and he had progressed by virtue of hard work. He had published brilliant papers on the geological structure of Corsica, which had eventually earned him the respect of a distinguished sponsor, Professor Termier at the Ecole des Mines in Paris ...”

“... In May 1941, after the sudden flight to England of Hitler’s deputy, Rudolf Hess, who had deluded himself that he could persuade the British to make peace, a joke went round Berlin. ‘So you’re the madman,’ Churchill says to Hess. ‘No,’ Hess replies, ‘only his deputy!’ That Hitler was insane was something many Germans came to believe in the later stages of the war ...”

“... By far the most striking image of Richard II is the one found in the great portrait of him, crowned and enthroned, which still survives in Westminster Abbey. Painted in the 1390s, when the king was in his twenties, it gives him a slightly boyish, even feminine appearance, with red cheeks, full lips and a small goatee beard ...”

“... It is not easy to determine which is the better book. Richard Burton was printed by Butler and Tanner Limited, Peter Sellers by the Fakenham Press, and since the one establishment is in Somerset and the other in Norfolk, it is fair to absolve both of them from the sort of catchpenny opportunist hustling which these days has the publishing world of London by the throat ...”

“... On the evening of 10 March 1969, Richard Crossman, Harold Wilson’s new Secretary of State for Social Services (‘SSSS? Impossible!’ Crossman wrote in his diary), reached into one of his three ministerial red boxes to find a long report by a still rather obscure Conservative barrister. Geoffrey Howe had entered Parliament in 1964, only to lose his seat when Wilson increased Labour’s majority from four to 95 in 1966 ...”

“... of the schools. It has even been suggested in the literature, that though a notion of necessity may have some sort of intuition behind it ... this notion [of a distinction between necessary and contingent properties] is just a doctrine made up by some bad philosopher, who (I guess) didn’t realise that there are several ways of referring to the same thing ...”

“... on slave labour imported from Africa. In a chapter on the development of the Caribbean islands, Richard Sheridan underestimates the role of slave labour. ‘The New World plantation represented the capitalistic exploitation of land,’ he writes, ‘with a combination of African labour, European technology and management, Asiatic and American ...”

“... There is a church in Fleet Street, almost opposite El Vino, where Richard Baxter used to preach in 1660. Baxter’s reconciling, ecumenical attitude toward churches and public worship is still maintained here, at St Dunstan’s-in-the-West. The first thing you notice is an exotic Rumanian screen, for St Dunstan’s is much used by members of a Rumanian Church in communion with the Church of England ...”

“... order. And if the role of the new Kyoto Center is to facilitate such a process, then a bit of salt may be in order. If one reacts too strongly, there is a danger of increasing the self-importance of these individuals and giving them extra exposure as guardians of cultural kudos. So how do we help both the Japanese and ourselves? The first essential is to make ...”

“... genres. True, Fahrenheit 451 seemed to prove that Science Fiction was outside his range: but there may have been personal strains on Truffaut then – including that of filming in England, with uneasy backing and a perhaps too-pat idea. Tirez sur le pianiste, his second full-length feature, had actually been enrichedby mixing slapstick, melodrama, romance and ...”

“... months, who referred to Trelawny as ‘Lord Byron’s jackal’. The phrase was less harsh than it may seem to a modern ear, since a jackal, in the parlance of the time, was someone who busied himself on another’s behalf; but for Crane the metaphor has both a keener and a darker edge. He calls his first chapter ‘The Wolf Cub’, and finds in Trelawny a ...”

“... then threatened not to pay; and the Commission started legal proceedings against them. They may end up in the dock at the European Court. Future historians of Europe may see the whole story as a constitutional struggle, like royal feuds with the House of Commons in Britain, or federal versus states’ rights in the ...”

“... Carlyle’s most famous dictum, ‘History is the essence of innumerable biographies,’ may have been meant only metaphorically, but another is specific enough: ‘Biography is by nature the most universally profitable, universally pleasant of all things: especially biography of distinguished individuals.’ Carlyle’s principles were more ...”