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“... tragedy, a squandered opportunity, a failure. ‘What was it he had missed?’ Kazin asks of William Dean Howells, whose modest novels fought the battle for realism as best they could. ‘Howells had missed something, and he knew it as well as the generations after him were to know it . . . He had spoken in all the accents of greatness without ever ...”

“... Rubin for the New York Times Magazine and the New Republic, George Packer for the New Yorker, Rory McCarthy for the Guardian and James Astill for the Economist have produced great pieces. But even the most energetic analysts cannot move freely. Astill’s longest conversation with an Iraqi in Fallujah was with a man urinating against a wall with a suitcase on ...”

“... and Caroline’s half-brother, Blaise. The most important historical figures are Hay, Henry Adams, William Randolph Hearst, and Presidents McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt, though there are cameo appearances from many others, including Adams’s brother Brooks, author of the imperialist manifesto Law of Civilisation and Decay (1895), and Henry James, as well as ...”

“... brought the unit back online after pressure from Littlechild’s successor as regulator, Callum McCarthy. The writing was on the wall for the Americans. The windfall tax suggested there’d be a tighter regulatory regime under Labour, and shortly after the American buying spree began, wholesale prices for electricity plummeted. There was a rush for the ...”

“... treatment of religion and a Harlem only barely understood south of 125th Street, was compared to William James and William Faulkner. In Paris in 1950 Baldwin had read A Portrait of the Artist and its hero’s story was not lost on him. The need to do battle with religion and his own oppressed nation, some of whose members ...”

“... than close friends. Holroyd gives a fine account of his relationship with the amiable Ibsenite William Archer. Shaw, working as an art critic, would go with Archer to the shows. ‘He didn’t know much about painting then,’ said Archer, ‘but he thought he did, and that was the main point.’ It was the same, perhaps, with women He devoted some of his ...”

“... spasms of virtuous indignation about the wickedness of a small number of idealists of years ago. William Empson was stirred to an opposite kind of ire by one of many hack works, The Traitors by Alan Moorehead, who ‘specifically denounced them for having had the impudence to obey their own consciences’, instead of understanding that a citizen’s duty is ...”

“... literature ought to share generic features with its more popular cousins, but it doesn’t; Cormac McCarthy and Jonathan Lethem are not of the same genre as Philip K. Dick, however long Margaret Atwood managed to ‘pass’. Indeed, the solution may actually be a rather simple one, namely that modernism is not a genre, while SF emphatically is – and this ...”

“... Beginner, published in 1966, about living in Cairo as a child between the wars: her father, Sir William Goodenough Hayter, was a judge with the Anglo-Egyptian Service, a vital arm of the British Protectorate running the country from the wings. There were many prints of Egypt in our Zamalek flat – picturesque views of the ruins and the pyramids and Old ...”

“... Secret-keeping must be made even more secure. The exposure of Soviet espionage fuelled the McCarthy-era enthusiasm for commie-hunting, but there was a price to be paid: preventative measures such as political vetting and compartmentalisation jeopardised the build-up of the American arsenal just as the US was moving into the thermonuclear age and ...”

“... He might have ruined it with its women: the Toni Ware chapter in particular sounds like Cormac McCarthy breaking his hymen on horseback. (RIP.) He might have ruined it with his doubt, which caused him to turn somersaults like a cracked-out fairground child. (‘Is it showing off if you hate it?’ Hal Incandenza asks in Infinite Jest.) But it is there. The ...”

“... as the United Public Workers and the American Labor Party – earned her a thick file during the McCarthy era. She was put under surveillance by the FBI, had to declare that she wasn’t a communist – she wasn’t – and was repeatedly interrogated by the State Department’s Loyalty Security Board.) At the height of the Cold War in the early ...”

“... as a major writer, the poète maudit of black America. Like his mentor Faulkner (and later Cormac McCarthy), Himes appealed to a Parisian readership convinced of the essential savagery of American life. ‘What the great body of Americans most disliked’ about his work, Himes believed, ‘was the fact that I came too close to the truth.’ He wasn’t wrong ...”

“... was not to be wrung out of himself, but rather to be discovered by other means, and other men. William Blackstone, Commentaries If you were sitting down today to set out the principles of a good system of criminal justice, with a blank sheet of paper and all the wisdom of hindsight at your disposal, you would probably start, as I would, with the principle ...”

“... on 1 June, on Dunkirk’s perimeter canal, where he and his troop were reunited with Major A.O. McCarthy, the battery commander, a regular army officer attached to the Territorials. A Troop’s guns were set up on the inside bank of the canal, from where they fired their last barrage until their supply of ammunition was exhausted. The troop then ...”