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“... become painful: ‘As for the New Testament, narrative power of the highest quality (in the service of the great message it conveys) is displayed time after time.’ Phelps’s studied blandness mostly muffles – here, suffocatingly – any grinding of axes. Nonetheless, a certain amount of parti is being pris. He admits in the Preface that many ...”

“... for which society cannot find a use. In 1829, an Oxford-trained barrister called Sir William Robert Grove found a new way of making electricity: he trickled oxygen and hydrogen gases over a pair of electrodes and produced three things. One was heat. The second was water. The third was electricity. There were no moving parts to the instrument, and no ...”

“... them there; the families’ ancestors; a barbecue; the holidaymakers’ children; mosquitoes; service-industry employees; the ibis; fruit trees; the daytime sky; night and stars. These are the mosquitoes, humming across four extremely long lines (the extended verse line echoes the oral tradition on which this ‘song cycle’ draws): they find the ...”

“... other but with all of it ultimately deadening. The story appeared in 1960 in Kenyon Review, where Robert Lowell would very likely have seen it, and where he would, I suspect, have found the penultimate line of his poem ‘The Flaw’, addressed to a woman lying beside him: ‘Dear Figure curving like a question mark’. Callisto’s girlfriend ‘lay like a ...”

“... peace’. When set beside ‘anti-courtly’ Spenserian verse, ‘To Penshurst’ and ‘To Sir Robert Wroth’ ‘give the sense of a nation which, whatever its faults, is essentially harmonious and well-ordered and reflects credit on its governors’. Even so, there are dangers in calling Jonson a ‘court poet’ and a ‘conservative’: more of them ...”

“... were used by the Government to counter the hold of English-speaking capitalism. The Civil Service was greatly expanded and its ethnic character radically altered. In a sense, the 1948 election was the workers’ revolution in South Africa. Yet because there was a common danger from the black proletariat and growing international pressure against the ...”

“... were the ‘reformadoes’, Parliamentary soldiers previously disbanded and now eager for fresh service. And not least there were the Presbyterian colonels and majors within the New Model itself who, once geographically separated from their colleagues in the high command, could be turned against them. In the spring of 1647 it was Presbyterian ...”

“... of the reactionary veteran and Freikorps man; doubly objectionable in one who had seen so little service. Kissinger’s fear of weakness and humiliation, and his pathetic adoration of the winning or the stronger side, has an interesting counterpart in much the same period. As he was working his way into Harvard, so we learn from Isaacson, in late-night ...”

“... inspired by avian flu, or the belief that it addressed a ‘black swan’ event – revealed the service’s inability to cope with a pandemic surge, and raised particular concerns about the amount of Personal Protective Equipment available for staff and the supply of ventilators. Sally Davies, then the chief medical officer for England, made one of the few ...”

“... failing to intercede on the victims’ behalf. This was the line taken in Massacre in Rome (and in Robert Katz’s book on which the film was based). Cosmatos and his producer, Carlo Ponti, were prosecuted for ‘defaming the memory of the pope’ and received six-month suspended sentences.Even more astonishing were the legal proceedings in 1994 against ...”

“... Robert​ Reed became president of the United Kingdom Supreme Court on 13 January 2020, succeeding Lady Hale. By the end of 2021, the Supreme Court had produced 111 judgments since his appointment, 53 in 2020 and 58 in 2021, with Lord Reed himself sitting in 56 of these cases. These decisions give us an opportunity to assess how his Supreme Court is performing in the current malign political atmosphere ...”

“... more? Even within that group, Stewart is exceptionally resourceful. His voice can be put in the service of feelings as they bubble slowly from confusion to clarity. Or it can be used to signal the intimation of half-thoughts, shadowy promptings of a kind that only a first-rate writer may catch in words. There is a scene early in The Shopworn Angel where he ...”

“... What is done in offices, to generalise, is pretty boring and derivative, being at the hands-off service-end of those other places of work where things got made, mined, taught or sold. Work that is always about something other than itself. Paperwork. Allowed to play, I typed ‘Dear Sir’ at the desk on the huge typewriter, sitting high on the chair, legs ...”

“... seems to have left him a parting gift: a small compass that William’s most recent biographer, Robert Richardson, takes as a hint that her lover orient himself in her direction.* This may be over-reading – William was an enthusiastic hiker – but the temptation is understandable: both before the marriage and for more than 30 years afterwards, she is the ...”

“... spent three years revising, Hergé said: ‘My childhood, my adolescence, Boy Scouting, military service – all of it was grey.’ A few years later he made a similar speech to Peeters, saying, however, that scouting had been in colour. His father was in the rag trade and there was a twin uncle. ‘They had the same moustache,’ Hergé recalled, ‘and ...”