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“... landscape at the mouth of the Thames Estuary. I should be out there now. I have been brooding on Peter Ackroyd’s notion that the Thames is a river like the Ganges or the Jordan, a place of pilgrimage, a source of spiritual renewal. ‘The river itself becomes a tremulous deity,’ he asserts. I carried Ackroyd’s epic, Thames: Sacred River, as I made a ...”

“... of going on.Murdoch became world famous as a novelist, and is the subject of a fine biography by Peter Conradi, but the lives of the others are not so well known. Anscombe, Murdoch and Midgley all came from middle-class families in suburban London. Their abilities were evident early, and they were encouraged to go to university. Not so Foot. Philippa ...”

“... mettle in the towns, where they could prepare for government once the Red Army had come through. Peter Conradi handles this material extremely well, and draws on E.P. Thompson’s lectures in Stanford in 1981 about his brother, later collated by his widow, Dorothy Thompson, as Beyond the Frontier. E.P. is more committed than Conradi to the idea that Frank ...”

“... it plain he ‘would not return alive’. Using the alias ‘Omar Hakim’, he also accompanied Peter Arnett and Peter Bergen of CNN to the caves. Bergen was sufficiently struck by his intensity and intelligence to talk about him in his book on al-Qaida, Holy War Inc; only later did he become aware of al-Suri’s ...”

“... a well-publicised theory that Jewish Bolsheviks were behind the troubles in Ireland. According to Peter Martland’s commentary on the MI5 files recently made available at the National Archives, Joyce also joined the ‘K’ society, a.k.a. the ‘Inner Organisation’, a shadowy group of thugs who specialised in disrupting Communist meetings. These were ...”

“... him to manipulate, in this case with Traubel’s help, the disposition, recovery and subsequent reading of important documents, a process that creates some measure of suspense and unpredictability in an account of the final years that might, over so long a work, degenerate into a record merely of illness and decline. The mess functions as an archive for the ...”

“... to Lydia Davis, say?) and the letters are not interesting in themselves, but they are worth reading to hear how much more herself she is in the stories. In the letters, curiously, she sounds like just anyone. She even goes through that phase where you open with salutations like ‘Hello you no good wenchy slut’, drawn for some reason in rose-garden ...”

“... all times emphasised his spiritual kinship with fellow Swabians like Hegel, Hölderlin and Johann Peter Hebel (a writer of enchanting Alemannic folk-tales). He saw himself as a contributor to this tribal lineage, and associated his writings with it; his biographer reports on this powerful rural mystique, and is (as far as I know) the first author to do so ...”

“... sensitive bus named after me in Leeds. I just wish it could have been a tram.9 March. I am reading Colm Tóibín’s New Ways to Kill Your Mother. Of Hart Crane’s suicide he writes: ‘He walked on deck … took off his coat, folded it neatly over the railing (not dropping it on deck) … then suddenly he vaulted over the railing and jumped into the ...”

“... that ‘their glimpses of ordinary life communicate instantly across the centuries’; but then reading any great literature, as Carey says in the encomium with which he closes his autobiography, ‘makes you see that ordinary things are not ordinary’: like Chesterton, another of his heroes, Carey professes an ‘amazement at normality’. Ordinary things ...”

“... tribute is reproduced here in its entirety. The Glass of the Sinful Soul does not make for easy reading now, unless the reader has a special taste for a brand of women’s mysticism that began earlier, in Germany and the Lowlands, with the devotio moderna. Cries and ejaculations fly thick and fast, the soul seems to labour unavailingly, and sinks into a ...”

“... as a foolish parasite on Johnson’s greatness, a ‘tomtit twittering on an eagle’s back’, as Peter Pindar had called him. Then, in 1925, the seesaw that had always been Boswell’s fate tilted once again. That year saw the beginning of one of three remarkable American initiatives, all linked in some way to Yale University, that would considerably enrich ...”

“... streak, of the absence of books in his rooms and his habitual preference for partying over reading, and of his dislike of serious intellectual discussions, during which he tended to slope off to the piano. His manuscripts were mis-spelt and badly punctuated. He never learned any language well enough to speak it, and it is not clear that his French was ...”

“... interpret such conflicts in terms of ideology or class legislation can find a useful corrective in Peter Jones’s demonstration of the almost infinite variety of local circumstances. What suited the wealthy in one village might work to the advantage of smallholders in the next. In a situation like this, any policy of innovation at the centre was bound to have ...”

“... of the enemy, as she did in the Fortnightly; she was happier with the implacability of Lord Peter Wimsey. In 1940 Virginia Woolf was asked to supply ‘Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid’ for an American symposium on current affairs concerning women. She had to fall back on rambling and padded reflections which she hoped might help in years to come the ...”