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“... scholarship took him. He managed to do well enough in his A-levels to get into Leeds University to read law, where he got a predictably disappointing degree. Both his parents were, in different ways, politically committed and Straw as boy and student had intense political interests. School and university provided opportunities not so much for learning as for ...”

“... and Guts in High School (1978), Great Expectations and Don Quixote, these books were impossible to read cover to cover. Her best-crafted work of this period is the completely linear, episodic Kathy Goes to Haiti (1978), and the contemporaneous story ‘Florida’, which turns the plot of the 1948 film Key Largo into farcical psychological quicksand. Acker ...”

“... One is the production of Michael Hastings’s play, Tom and Viv, and the other the publication of Peter Ackroyd’s biography, T.S. Eliot. They of course share a subject, the poet himself. But this choice of subject, the life of the writer with perhaps the biggest public image of any in our time, suggests something else they have in common. These two works ...”

“... beggar has a mean face, looks a crook or, as today, because he’s not doing a good job. 21 March. Read the hitherto unpublished extracts from Sylvia Plath’s diaries without much interest. I hadn’t known about Hughes’s homophobia – though I’m not sure that antipathy to Truman Capote can be so subsumed, Capote really deserving a phobia to himself. As ...”

“... spume that played upon the ghostly paradigm of The Anxiety of Influence when I turned the page and read: ‘Yeats wrote that “Plato thought nature but a spume that plays/Against a ghostly paradigm of things.” ’ However, this is probably what Bloom calls a ‘strong misreading’; the swerve from Yeats’s text doesn’t seem to me to help Yeats, but that ...”

“... hesitated to divulge the surprise of this ending, but the number of people under, say, 12 who read the LRB and have not read the Harry Potter books cannot be large.) The moment when Harry realises that he mistook himself for his father is quite powerful; and it is, after all, the only real kind of time travel there ...”

“... centuries, that of Tacitus’ little book was bleak. For the most part, it seems not to have been read or even copied, except at the great Benedictine house of Fulda in central Germany. There, in the middle of the ninth century, a learned hagiographer named Rudolf wove material from the Germania into an account of the Saxons – clear evidence that a ...”

“... of Berlin dangling her sons against various backyards, parks, untamed beaches. The first time I read her stories I felt inexplicably lonely, and then realised it was because I wanted to have already read them a dozen times. I wished to get to the point where we were companions, where I could open the book at any page and ...”

“... on the subject. A volume did appear in 1988 – English Extremists, written with Deyan Sudjic and Peter Cook, celebrating the postmodern architects Campbell Zogolovitch Wilson Gough – but since then his medium has been television. Meades has never been a fully paid-up architectural correspondent; he argues in Museum without Walls that taking up such a job ...”

“... bathtub figures towards the end of the poem, when the Trojan hero Hector (as I will call him: Peter Green believes we should eradicate the familiar Roman equivalents for Homer’s names, so he calls him Hektōr) has been killed by Achilles (and, phew, Green calls him Achilles rather than Akhilleus: two cheers for inconsistency). Hector’s ...”

“... her left nipple. In Europe, the print was interpreted as a scene of rape, but the critics didn’t read Japanese. In the text arranged in the space around the three entwined bodies, the shell diver exclaims: ‘You hateful octopus! Your sucking at the mouth of my womb makes me gasp for breath! Ah! Yes … it’s … there! With the sucker, the ...”

“... Manson, incidentally, were both made to attend their first day at school dressed as girls.) To read up on serial murders is to sup full of horrors, and also to sup full of explanations. ‘Psychopathic dissociation’, acute, chronic and paranoid schizophrenia, ‘disorders of the hypothalmus’, ‘organic dysfunctions, psychopathological behaviour and ...”

“... towards Darwinism and the science’s wider nationalistic uses. Uses have never been central to Peter Bowler’s work: indeed, in the past he has had a bone to pick with Edinburgh sociologists who promoted an instrumental approach to science. Nonetheless in his sturdy account of Theories of Human Evolution he, too, looks at the wider cultural and racial ...”

“... on the belief that the word ‘history’ stood for ‘hiss-Tory’, but the recent work of Peter Clarke, for example, has shown how much these difficulties were part of the central experience of a generation. The other great refuge of liberal optimism, in 1914 as in 1867, was education. It is hard to read Russell On ...”

“... poetry its variety and experimentalism. Gunn and Davie are included in both anthologies, but to read their collected poems (the next step after reading Davie’s superb ‘Time Passing, Beloved’ and Gunn’s ‘On the Move’ in O’Brien) is to see how the Movement contains the germ of its own undoing in these restless and questing poets. In fact, the ...”