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“... of Iraqis being killed for not fighting, and their grimy pictures of themselves, as lost as the English-speaking soldiers they have been living with. Al-Jazeera has had reporters inside Mosul, Baghdad, Basra and Nasiriya, one of them the irrepressible Tasir Alouni, fluent veteran of the Afghanistan war, and they have presented a much more detailed, more ...”

“... such negativity had all but drained away. ‘A new generation of Dadaists has emerged today,’ Richard Hamilton wrote in 1961, ‘but son of Dada is accepted.’ With Jeff Koons, the current maestro of the readymade, whose work is the subject of a retrospective at the Whitney in New York (until 19 October), acceptance has become affirmation, even ...”

“... of Francis Spufford’s engaging new book calls them, meaning above all Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins – believe in spite of all evidence that eventually the religious will see sense. And yet with their magical belief in the truth of science – their taking for granted a consensus about the value of scientific evidence – and their unspoken ...”

“... feelingfully about the perils of too much Eng. Lit. He ‘emerged from the experience of reading English at Cambridge’, he explains in the introduction, ‘imbued with a thriving, unshakeable contempt for anyone who had had the temerity to attempt the writing of literature in the last seventy or eighty years’. For a while he made one ...”

“... millennials: Baume christened Frankie after the precocious underachiever in Franny and Zooey, an English major who’s ‘sick of not having the courage to be an absolute nobody’. Her epigraph – ‘the worst that being an artist could do to you would be that it would make you slightly unhappy constantly’ – is borrowed from another Salinger ...”

“... shyness meant she would always hate it, that both her parents were academics (Ellmann’s father, Richard, was Joyce’s biographer, her mother, Mary, a celebrated Tennyson scholar). The unspooling of all of this is intercut with shorter sections, written in full sentences, describing the journey of a cougar that sets out across Ohio to find her stolen ...”

“... brought classical education under pressure from science, as well as from subjects such as English literature, which was beginning to construct its own canon and articulate its claims to represent the best of vernacular, national culture. Even at Oxford and Cambridge, the arrival of new notions of discipline and method (often imported from Germany with ...”

“... and the ‘trashy’. Classy Europeans are gorgeous and erudite; they invariably speak fluent English. Trashy Europeans are funny foreigners, and make the sorts of mistakes an anglophone does when trying to imitate a funny foreigner. The classiest of them all is Greta’s lover, Flavia, whom Greta calls ‘Big Swiss’ because she’s tall and from ...”

“... an 18th-century house, brought up, truth to tell, in the 18th century.’ He went to Eton and read English at Cambridge, where he met Nick Tomalin, Hugh Thomas, Mark Boxer and Neal Ascherson. Among the enduring friendships of his student years was that of the founding editor of the LRB, Karl Miller. McEwen and his wife, Romana, later went on a road trip with ...”

“... out, in the words of the King of Brobdingnag, as a pernicious race of little odious vermin. Even Richard Rorty, the self-styled postmodernist liberal, felt able to pronounce that cruelty was ‘the worst thing we do’. Torture has posed a problem for philosophers. Simple utilitarianism has notorious difficulties in explaining why torture or other such abuse ...”

“... at a Spanish public. (Lorca’s works are listed here only in their Spanish editions.) For an English reader, it may be helpful to remember that Lorca remains a mythical figure in Spain, and it would no doubt be a biographer’s coup to offer definitive proof of his sexuality. Moreover, as Gibson (himself now a Spanish citizen) acknowledges, there is no ...”

“... his new book’s title a certain resonance.) At the same time, Austin’s fastidiousness with the English tongue was ‘an essential half of what my father despaired of for himself (eloquence was the other half), who possessed by the time I came into his life no ordinary language, his Russian and Polish fragmentary, his Hebrew primitive, his Yiddish ...”

“... Three or four years ago, a friend of mine was asked to illustrate a Teaching English book for the Ministry of Education in Cairo. He was (is) an Egyptian, but an Egyptian from outside officialdom – a cartoonist. He painted a series of charming and instantly recognisable street scenes: stacked green-grocers’, lemonade vendors, decked-out taxicabs, dust-carts pulled by donkeys ...”

“... the years since 1978. Romola herself had allowed a portion of the notebooks to be translated into English and published in 1936, in an edition from which she excised most of the erotic material, a great deal of the obsessive repetition, and all the execrable poems. Until now, all translations into other languages were made from that ...”

“... language in which it could have been done. The selection of his poems in German, with the fine English versions of Michael Hamburger, has just been issued in a revised edition with some forty new translations. Wittgenstein’s Tractatus is itself, in a sense, a voice out of the war, in which the philosopher has conducted himself with suicidal ...”