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“... getting one’s bearings. The revised English edition includes later news taking us to the Anita Hall case and the reactions to Thelma and Louise. Yet Marilyn French’s The War against Women is the more telling book. It is brief, where Faludi is excursive; it does not wear the accoutrements of research as well (it has no index), and it is written in a much ...”

“... Road to work in the Cambridge Reference Library, a dark Victorian building behind the Town Hall (gaslit in memory, though it surely can’t have been), where George III was about to make his second entrance. Sometime that autumn I bought, at Deighton Bell in Trinity Street, a copy of George III and the Politicians by Richard Pares, a book I have ...”

“... medical officer, Mokaré’s close friend, asked to be buried beside him: the present Albany town hall stands above their graves.There has been criticism that the Aboriginal voices in the book are muted and distant. This is often true, not least in the chapters on language and musicology; and it is part of the whole enormous story that the distances between ...”

“... you say about him, you say about yourself. ‘The whole corpus of Robespierre studies is a hall of mirrors,’ Mark Cumming says in his piece in this volume. Intending only to look at Robespierre, we see ourselves with our own startled eyes, starved or gross, inflated or diminished. Carlyle’s ‘thin lean Puritan and Precision’ scuttles forever ...”

“... down through the South-West and the South, back to New York and New England. The Bowery dance hall, Niagara Falls and Grand Canyon as tourist attractions, the segregated South, the college campus – these are the springboards for her efforts to comprehend the deep structure of the American world. A left-wing Tocqueville, she is struck by the paradox of ...”

“... of his uncle being a farm-labourer, or the blighted life of the intelligent, radical cobbler John Antell who married into the family. Instead, Hardy exaggerates the scale of the Rockhampton cottage where he was born, his father’s status in the social scale (he attributes his comparative lack of success in the building business to his being by nature ...”

“... began to suffuse the novel, which up to then one could imagine as a sort of Russian Headlong Hall, with perfectibilians, deteriorationists, status-quo-ites contentedly discoursing while Squire Headlong-Stavrogin set a charge of dynamite to his property. Stavrogin, Kirilov and Shatov brought suffering – unacceptable to satire – into the tale. Not a ...”

“... and newspaper headline, impression and chronicle. For the middlebrow modernism of U.S.A., John Dos Passos shrewdly kept those registers apart, offering them separately on the page under the headings camera eye and newsreel. Here they are mashed together, and the effect is distinctly lumpy. There’s a reference to Firbank late in the book and perhaps ...”

“... to provide an adequate explanation or adequate documentation for the payments to any DFAC [dining-hall] subcontractors. The limited documentation that has been provided shows, for example, that KBR has added ‘overage’ factors of 10 to 35 per cent to each bill for one of the subcontractors. We still do not have an adequate explanation of the ...”

“... The rather pat conclusion arrived at is that it would be wrong to consider Mrs Benson as Radclyffe Hall in a cap and bonnet. Fred remembered as a child asking his mother to explain the difference between a bull and an ox: ‘she at once said that the bull was the father and the ox the uncle.’ That the Benson brothers were oxen and uncles is beyond doubt, but ...”

“... At one dinner party of New Age contributors, Mansfield – who was going by Yékaterina – met John Middleton Murry, an Oxford student who was starting up an art and literary magazine of his own, Rhythm. He was already her fan: ‘In a German Pension seemed to express, with a power I envied, my own revulsion from life,’ he would write in his ...”

“... the time she returned home her ‘path was set’, and she arranged to graduate early from Erasmus Hall High School (where her classmates included Neil Diamond and the chess champion Bobby Fischer, who dressed ‘like some sort of deranged pilot’). She worked backstage at a theatre in Greenwich Village, and through one of the actresses there met and began ...”

“... I appear to be bitching out the primate of Rome.Afterwards​ Hope and I walk through another hall of human heads. The air inside the Vatican Museums is a whisper, of inside information, yes, of history, yes, but even more of that alternate reality, the parallel track that when you enter it carries you alongside life. ‘Small dick equals big ...”

“... I want to read books about schizophrenia, especially Laing’s books and the books from Kingsley Hall.’ Yeah, fine, if you must, whatever. ‘Now I’m two people.’ Oh, OK.The art world loved The Childlike Life of the Black Tarantula, and it’s easy to see why. There’s such energy and humour in the way it cuts and jumps between textual realities, the ...”

“... and Lesbian Centre. (Margaret Thatcher may be impossible to displace as a totem of oppression, but John Major has been prime minister for a couple of years by the time the book begins.) The only actual gay character in the book, if you exclude the passing dreamboat in his van, is Chickie Jamieson, an elderly, unthreatening and neuter-seeming neighbour of the ...”