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“... gazing entranced at some household object, or perhaps reading a letter with a half-smile; there may have been a curtain, suggestive of veiled meaning; there would have been an enigma. We concentrated on it at the expense of the enigma moving among us, smiling with gallant determination.And then the queen passed close to me and I stared at her. I am ashamed ...”

“... by Al Alvarez’s little piece, ‘Doctor in the House’, which turns out not to be a homage to Richard Gordon (sadly), but a two-and-a-half-page chat about the problems of getting his house redecorated. Mr Alvarez’s wife makes no fewer than seven appearances in this brief narrative, yet her name is not mentioned once: this in spite of the fact that the ...”

“... a member of the Royal Society and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Andrei Sinyavsky may dismiss his ideas as ‘ridiculous’ and suggest that he has no significance except as a stalking-horse for the ideas of Solzhenitsyn, but the excitement generated by his musings on Russian society, and especially by his essay ‘Russophobia’ which ...”

“... Country House. The first edition was published by the Clarendon Press in 1971 and it remains, it may well be argued, the author’s finest achievement. In a field in which Georgian ‘taste’ and ‘proportion’ were still uncritically revered, the book was one of the first which did not treat Victorian country houses as monstrosities or as ...”

“... as he was to the antiquities, though not in a way that pleased everyone: as his fellow traveller Richard Chandler wrote in the journals he published a decade after their return to England, ‘several of the Turks murmured, and some threatened, because he overlooked their houses; obliging them to confine or remove the women, to prevent their being seen from ...”

“... John Bolton, the role of empire-minder has been taken over by Democrats and the anti-Trump media. (Richard Haass, the president of the Council on Foreign Relations, accordingly averred that any withdrawal from Syria is as unthinkable as withdrawal from Germany or Japan would be. Having those permanent garrisons abroad ‘keeps countries from doing things you ...”

“... Of Haddon-Riddoch the publishers say only that he ‘started’ as a trap collector, of whom there may be more than we would think. An earlier, slimmer version of his book appeared in 2001. Its title is not the least of its oddities; it is as if the public hangman had published a rundown on drops and nooses called ‘Urban Reveries’. Fundamentally, it is a ...”

“... same and also different. To adult children who have not yet needed to care for their parents, or may never, lucky dogs, this may be a cautionary tale.’ ‘Diagnosis is everything,’ she tells us at the outset. Her advice? Challenge doctors: ‘Doctors are not gods, though some act that way. Some hate being ...”

“... to deal with miscarriages of justice. It noted the criticism of the Home Office made by Sir John May, who led an inquiry into the cases of the Guildford Four and also the Maguire Seven, whose convictions were quashed in June 1991. May wrote that the Home Office’s ‘approach … was throughout reactive, it was never ...”

“... of borders, whether political, cultural or economic.The second way of thinking about fascism may seem more useful. Some far-right populists haven’t been content merely to display hostility to liberal democratic institutions, but have set about dismantling them. Under Viktor Orbán’s clientelist leadership in Hungary, the judiciary and media have been ...”

“... It may not be remembered in the current mammoth Frank Lloyd Wright retrospective at the New York Museum of Modern Art, but in May 1939, just after the German occupation of Czechoslovakia, Frank Lloyd Wright paid a significant visit to England. His purpose was to deliver four lectures to the RIBA; lectures that he supplemented by showing 16 mm colour films of life at Taliesin West, the Arizona winter home of his peripatetic architectural family ...”

“... it, to discover beneath its apparent unity the actual, irreducible forces that comprise it. What Richard Rorty called the ‘linguistic turn’ in philosophy, which was repealed subsequently in literary theory, was driven by the conviction that the only thing real in the subject was language, and that the only way for humanists to compete with scientists was ...”

“... be, defamatory by a jury. To this uncertainty is added another: the cost. Who knows what damages may be awarded? Who knows at the start of a libel action what the lawyers’ bills will turn out to be? The Daily Mail defended a case against the Moonies. The paper had said that the church was in the habit of brainwashing its converts. When the first writ ...”

“... escamotage, in the interest of ease, and of the abysmal public naivety, becomes inevitable. You may multiply the little facts that may be got from pictures and documents, relics and prints, as much as you like – the real thing is almost impossible to do, and in its essence the whole effect is as naught: I mean the ...”

“... obsession – the gorgeous, disorienting, sometimes repellent phenomenon known as outsider art. It may be that anything in which one becomes absorbed produces its ready share of ambivalence: that objects of fixation trouble as much as they arouse. Certainly, that would seem to be true in my case. Strange fits of passion have I known – a carload of them ...”