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“... have been asked to confront challenges as serious as the ones we face right now,’ Obama said, truly, after will.i.am and Sheryl Crow had busked their way through Bob Marley’s ‘One Love’, with Herbie Hancock noodling on piano; and the Gay Men’s Chorus of Washington DC had pounded out ‘My Country, ’Tis of Thee’; and Garth Brooks had ...”

“... species to have any control whatsoever over how we evolve,’ they write. As it happens, Fuller said the same in 1966: ‘For the first time in the history of the world, man is just beginning to take conscious participation in some of his evolutionary formulations.’ Richard Buckminster Fuller, who liked to be called Bucky, was born in 1895 to a family of ...”

“... She was excitedly preparing for a visit from the poet, philosopher and ‘saint in sandals’, Edward Carpenter. Born and Daniell, two of the half-dozen ‘puzzled idealists’ whose lives Sheila Rowbotham follows in Rebel Crossings, were members of the Bristol Socialist Society, a body that aspired to ‘the attainment of the higher ideals of ...”

“... joy was short-lived because the pardon was rescinded the next day. The president had not, it was said, appreciated the nature and extent of Toussie’s previous criminal offending. Nor had he known of substantial donations made by Toussie’s father and other members of his family to John McCain’s presidential campaign a few months earlier, which (it was ...”

“... Session. No other reigning sovereign had visited the principal university buildings since King Edward VII opened them in 1905. Six months before the Queen’s visit, the Vice-Chancellor, Professor J.M. Whittaker, put to his recently-appointed Professor of English Literature a ‘general idea’ – to celebrate the Queen’s visit by reviving the masques ...”

“... reflex disbelief in the cynical, or anyone who has actually visited the place. What is being said, loud and bold, online and on fences around hidden development sites, seems to be the absolute contrary of what is all too visibly there. That is the first rule of the river. And it leads to an unavoidable question: what are the consequences for these ...”

“... it is not) an official biography, he has evidently depended on or even worked fairly closely with Edward Mendelson, perhaps Auden’s ‘scholar-in-chief’, his literary executor and the editor who worked directly according to his wishes. And yet legends afflict Mendelson’s work as well. After his edition of the Collected Poems, which retains Auden’s own ...”

“... drawings were presented to me by a very ill man,’ the catalogue entry read, quoting Edward Adamson, the art therapist who first encountered J.J. Beegan in 1946. By the time they met, Adamson explained, Beegan ‘had been in a locked ward in the hospital for many years. He was incontinent and unable to speak clearly. He drew vigorously on the ...”

“... of communism, we are no longer sure that ‘the golden age is within us,’ as Lévi-Strauss said, but there’s no doubt that the apocalypse is. And the fear of nuclear war is heightened by the raw, primordial tenor of our politics, above all in the United States. What Pankaj Mishra has called an ‘age of anger’ is also an age of disinhibition, at ...”

“... of the best stories come in Recollections of the Last Days of Shelley and Byron by the adventurer Edward John Trelawny, and so are a bit too good to be quite true, but they are evidence of the way Shelley came across. Trelawny’s account of Shelley’s attempt to learn how to swim in a deep pool in the Arno catches the thing very well:He doffed his jacket ...”

“... I’d thought then but not much more, with too many post-mortems on previous meetings, what he had said to her, what she had said to him and what they had both really meant. The letters date back to the late 1940s and early 1950s and bring back all the dreariness of digs and Oxford out of term, Sunday lunches in cafés up ...”

“... who responded to the 11-year-old’s opening lines – ‘“Oh, how do you do, Mrs Brown?” said Mrs Tompkins. “If only I had known you were going to call I should have tidied up the drawing-room”’ – by icily observing: ‘Drawing-rooms are always tidy.’ That put a stop to fiction for a time. But Lucretia Jones’s capacity to freeze up her ...”

“... that it was lucky to find such nice people in the local, he replied: ‘I’ve often heard that said over here. I don’t understand it. In the US we go where it suits, and don’t bother about the people.’ Possibly because the staff was prepossessing, but also because the place was comparatively remote from more frequented scenes, an occasional ...”

“... with some degree of truth as ‘the disease so often found in English culture’. ‘Gentility,’ said Mr Alvarez at that time, ‘is a belief that life is always more or less orderly, people always more or less polite, their emotions and habits more or less decent and more or less controllable; that God, in short, is more or less good.’ I doubt if there ...”

“... are those who will never be able to bring themselves, even under the threat of Reagan, to want Edward Kennedy as President. Mosley did appreciate the existence, though not the nature, of the human craving to believe something. What he really offered to meet, though, was different: the human craving to believe in someone. (Not the satisfaction which looks ...”