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“... a vote censuring the Chamberlain government for its failure to supply British troops in Norway. As Richard Davenport-Hines records, the minister of health spat on Profumo’s shoe after he passed through the lobbies. The Tory chief whip told him that he was ‘an utterly contemptible little shit’. Even for a headstrong young man it was a remarkably ...”

“... of Cornish design and granite sold in various sizes by large department stores.’There was no English or imperial tradition of monumental memorials, no exemplars such as von Klenze’s Walhalla high above the Danube. There was no Arc de Triomphe, no Lincoln Memorial. Calton Hill possesses a hallucinatory grandeur, but Scotland was not a model for the War ...”

“... The author of ‘Naming of Parts’, probably the most anthologised English poem of the Second War, has too often been held to be that and that only. Like Julian Grenfell, author of ‘Into Battle’, he is seen as the saddest freak of the literary fairground: the one-poem poet. The publication of his collected poems will give the lie to that gross misperception ...”

“... the work. And she explores this with as much questing and well-furnished unobtrusive cleverness as Richard Sewall brought to his two-volume life of Emily Dickinson – another ‘dotty spinster’, who wrote of her own life: ‘Nothing has happened but loneliness.’ Stevie Smith would not, I think, have said that, though she was much aware of loneliness. Her ...”

“... In his early twenties he published what is probably to this day the most widely read work of English philosophy, Language, Truth and Logic (1936), and followed it with The Foundations of Empirical Knowledge (1940). Late in life he doubted whether much of Language, Truth and Logic was right, and complained that students are required to read it primarily ...”

“... War was to some extent (an extent he characteristically exaggerated) inspired and fashioned by the English captain’s writings. Heinz Guderian and others subsequently proclaimed themselves his disciples. Here was fame indeed, though of an unusual kind. Ideas about the proper use of tanks were not by any means Liddell Hart’s only contribution to the study of ...”

“... reformers. A recent impressive book by Keith Wrightson and David Levine, Poverty and Piety in an English Village,* suggested that Calvinist theology became especially acceptable to parish élites, the minority who were prospering in the great economic divide of the late 16th and early 17th centuries, as against the mass of the poor who were subsiding into ...”

“... make Pound extraordinary not the least is that he is a great writer – the only one writing in English – who lived through and recorded what it felt like to be defeated in the Second World War. I concentrate for the moment on The Pisan Cantos because that seems to me, as it does to Anthony Woodward, Pound’s ‘greatest achievement’. Everything that ...”

“... results. We are invited to understand pre-war Germany and its culture through the figure of Richard Strauss. In Strauss’s tone-poems and operas, Tuchman finds traces of the German sickness, which takes the form of morbidity, vulgarity and arrogance; and she says of the dissonances in Strauss’s Sinfonia Domestica: ‘If this is German home ...”

“... Angela Carter as the wolf-infested forest of Germanic folklore – or, for that matter, as a wet English wood. Another overture – ‘Overture and Incidental Music for A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ – puts on record the thoughts of the Changeling, that bone of contention between Oberon and Titania, here dubbed ‘the Golden Herm’, short for ...”

“... Nowhere are these contradictions and incoherences more visisbly acted out than in the career of Richard Nixon. It was Wills’s great achievement to show this in his one first-rate book – Nixon Agonistes: The Crisis of the Self-Made Man (1970). That Nixon was, had to be, an aberration came to be an article of faith for almost everyone. What Wills showed ...”

“... book his study most brings to mind, in the end, is not another anthropological work but Clockers, Richard Price’s best-selling novel about the Jersey City crack trade. In many ways, indeed, In Search of Respect out-does Clockers. Bourgois did not merely report on East Harlem, after all; he lived there with his wife and child for four years, researching the ...”

“... exacerbated the hardship. There were tense confrontations with the Dutch traders and the other English settlements further down the Connecticut Valley; and, although Pynchon claimed to believe in treating them as equals, there was open conflict with the Native Americans. Gaskill remarks that most colonists believed the natives to be, at least ...”

“... their carrot and stick ways by the Wellesley brothers (Arthur, the future duke of Wellington, and Richard). They took Low under their wing. His career as company handyman had begun. Men like Low were crucial to company rule in India. When he arrived in Jaipur in 1825 on his first big posting, the company’s resources were at full stretch. Two ...”

“... once said, ‘the soul of fact’. Beryl Bainbridge was one of the last of the pre-Google English novelists, the last, you might say, following Coleridge, for whom facts had a soul and were not simply pluckable. Take her novel Master Georgie, set in the Crimean War. While reading it, I decided to do a little background research. It was super-easy to ...”