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“... maturity, the end point of his own Bildungsroman. Shedding his childish preoccupation with ‘major writers’, White turned against ‘avant-garde tricksters’, leaving behind Mallarmé’s obfuscations and Proust’s longueurs to join dependable storytellers like Robert Stone and Joyce Carol Oates. He got mugged by realism. He realised that Elizabeth ...”

“... the basis of ocean food chains. The Aswan Dam and Thomas Midgely both have a place in John McNeill’s excellent environmental history of the 20th century. McNeill has done a vast amount of reading and his range is truly global. He discusses the effects of oil extraction from Tampico to the Niger delta, the problems caused by air pollution from ...”

“... the whodunnit in which the puzzle apparently remains unsolved. Did O’Brien’s protagonist, John Wade, murder his wife? Or not? And what happens to Wade himself? O’Brien does not tell you – at least not directly. The conundrum has so confounded most American reviewers that, after a few lines detailing the primary components of the central plot ...”

“... him highly as a historian of broadcasting. Few of these pieces are without interest, but none is a major contribution to the canon. By far the best piece of writing in the central section is by E.M. Forster, Orwell’s most dedicated contributor. The homosexual author of A Passage to India (serialised in German radio broadcasts to India in 1940 as anti-British ...”

“... about these leonine adventures (which led to Cobb’s forced retirement in August 1938) was Dr John Colin Carothers, the central figure in this study. McCulloch came to know Carothers while working on this book and the retired psychiatrist provided him with access to much material as well as allowing himself to be interviewed. We may assume that much of ...”

“... power relations. Hobbes’s ulterior aim was, of course, to defend a form of absolutism, extending John Selden’s thought that, in a household, only one man’s there to buy the meat. But Hobbes’s views about meaning threaten to prove subversive. Counterfactuals – imagined possibilities – can be used to challenge the status quo. Invert hegemony ...”

“... and was met by a near unanimous lack of critical acclaim. The screenplay was based on a novel by John Masters (1914-83), who had served in the British army in India before and during the Second World War. Masters’s family had had a relationship with India stretching back five generations; I have been told by elderly Indian army officers who served with him ...”

“... Hopper missed mixing it with the hard-drinking rabble-rousers, Flynn, Bogart and Sinatra, while John Wayne, with whom he acted in The Sons of Katie Elder and True Grit, called him a Communist and offered to explain why he, Wayne, ‘was worth a million per picture’. Hopper was, however, perfectly on time for the upcoming group of heroes, mumbling geniuses ...”

“... thought of as a man of principle is an indication of how desperate the situation has become. Two major issues confronted the victors. The first concerned the judiciary. The chief justice of the Supreme Court, Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry, had been a prisoner of the regime since 3 November 2007, detained in his own house, which was sealed off by barbed-wire ...”

“... Among philosophers​ of the 20th century, John Langshaw Austin is not a cultural celebrity like Heidegger, Russell, Sartre or Wittgenstein. But for a period after the Second World War, he was the leading figure of the school of ordinary language philosophy that dominated Oxford, achieved substantial influence in the wider Anglophone world and left its stamp for a much longer time on the way analytic philosophers work, think and write ...”

“... structure which bellowed ‘Design!’ and was met with incomprehension. The Beaubourg, the first major building obviously in thrall to Archigram, was equally unfavourably received. The reaction of the members of Archigram and their collaborator Cedric Price is shown in a film from 1980 in which they turn up in a minibus, apparently gobsmacked ...”

“... given that most portraits were of the rich and powerful, and flattery was one of the major currencies of social intercourse. Today we are inclined to admire portraits for their supposed honesty and insight, but we are more indulgent with paintings from the past. No one would suppose that portraits by Van Dyck or Reynolds are other than ...”

“... It is undeniable that parts of the panel are superbly painted but if Verrocchio was involved in a major way that would make him responsible for the composition. Yet one of the angels seems about to tumble out of the picture and the other (holding a lily as if he was Gabriel in the Annunciation) is uncomfortably situated in space. He also collides awkwardly ...”

“... counter to the slow march of figures, taking the form of silent communication between Christ and John, their contact barred by a stern Roman officer, as the Virgin Mary faints. Some of the later narratives in the nave (scenes from the New Testament twinned with the Old) achieve a similar intensity, reducing the action to minimal but memorable formulae, often ...”

“... a fortnight before, in August 1900, had exacerbated his decline, but eating bananas had been the major cause of death. A lawyer called Albert T. Patrick took charge of the funeral arrangements. On the day after Rice’s death, Patrick tried to have four cheques certified. The cheques, all made out to himself, totalled $250,000, and appeared to have been ...”