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“... the maiden speech for which he was instantly awarded the Garter. When I joined, I discovered that Richard Adrian is quite right: it is like a prep school. There are any number of corridors down which to get lost. Nobody tells you how to find the Gents, and you’re too shy to ask. The rituals are as arcane to the newcomer as they are familiar to the old ...”

“... the new work presents a more thoughtful self-portrait of Bloom, the female.Perhaps so, but we may be forgiven some doubt as to whether the fascination of Bloom’s ‘full identity as a woman’ is really what has got her book analysed in newspaper columns, crowed over at cocktail parties and passed about among friends with the relevant pages increasingly ...”

“... to be, many of them were soon adopted by players who never joined the camp, and so on. All this may well be true, but the reader still wants to know what the battle was all about, and is offered only the sketchiest description. The same holds good of Eales’s accounts of the famous players of the past. We learn about their lives and careers, the games they ...”

“... belonged to the part of Europe rooted in Roman Christianity’. By dismissing them to the East, we may intend no more than a recognition of the fact of their predicament as captives within the Soviet Empire – although we in the West have some ambivalent feelings about empires – and we may not intend to imply that they ...”

“... or perhaps because of them. In Hollywood, no one will ever say ‘no’ to an idea. Someone else may be fool enough to pick it up and develop it. It may become, at some future date, desirably hot. The closest a person comes to ‘no’ is ‘I pass.’ Rarely wishing to show his hand, everyone with power in the industry ...”

“... to the last relaxed years with the Duchess of Portsmouth. There is also some modern sauce. Charles may have been sexually, if unconsciously, attracted to his sister, Henriette-Anne, who was married to the sexually ambivalent brother of the French king. It is all beautifully told, with lively asides. We are informed that Charles’s alleged debauchery, as ...”

“... women on the edge of breakdown, but they looked pretty robust, if a bit impatient.’ It may be that Mass-Observation encouraged her in a habit which came naturally. Since most of us can bear the sufferings of others with fortitude, it would be wrong to mock Nella Last’s obsession with visions of drowning sailors and slaughtered hosts: but she does ...”

“... in the 1850s, of a ‘milieu intérieur’: ‘All of the vital mechanisms, however varied they may be, have always one goal, to maintain the uniformity of the conditions of life in the internal environment . . . The stability of the internal environment is the condition for the free and independent life.’Our bodies can only maintain homeostasis within ...”

“... location, probably in one of the many compounds owned by the Egyptian armed forces. At the end of May, Joe Biden announced a framework for an agreement on what he described as an ‘Israeli ceasefire proposal’, which was immediately rejected by Israel. According to the plan, a ceasefire would be declared and Israeli forces would begin to withdraw from ...”

“... briefly uniting the king with most of his domestic enemies. The revolutionary constitution of 3 May 1791 brought radical reform, Enlightenment ideas and – at last – coherent central authority to the country. This astonishing and brilliant revival of independence and creative energy is the subject of ...”

“... with the express purpose of creating the conditions for the sustenance of life. While it may seem that where some see God, Lovelock sees Gaia (‘Gaia looks after us’), he doesn’t say Gaia is God. He has never claimed that Gaia is sentient, or benevolent, or anything so obviously woo-woo as that. Rather, he maintains that all the evidence ...”

“... has nothing to do with air or water, and that accent is only part of the story. In different ways, Richard Burton and Aneurin Bevan (Beaverbrook’s ‘Bollinger Bolshevik’) were also champion putters-on. So, in a rather minor key, were at least half the members of my mother’s extended family. In a putting-it-on competition between Roy Jenkins and my ...”

“... Hugh Dalton observed that no good book ever got written between division bells. Crosland may have benefited from an enforced sabbatical. The Future of Socialism is not an academic study, however. The energy it conveys comes from the sense of its author as somebody recently bloodied in battle, waiting for the next push. Nor should Crosland be seen as ...”

“... Put on the kettle and make the tay, and if they weren’t happy, that you may. By the time he wrote this, O’Malley knew all about post-revolutionary disillusionment. He went on to produce a sequel, The Singing Flame, which is less accomplished but possesses much of the same drive and power. Always a stringent self-critic, he ...”

“... her own. Or named, as Clarissa is named for Mrs Dalloway, making her party for the Aids-stricken Richard a reprise. In fact, in Specimen Days, Whitman is not read at all. He is spoken, his words endlessly cited by the central character of each of the three tales. They cannot help it. Whitman takes over their voice. ‘He hadn’t meant to speak as the ...”