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“... an instrument by which people simplify, rationalise and retell social complexities. It’s a means to haul the abstract, the global and the relative into the realm of the concrete, the local and the absolute. It’s a way to lay claim to faith in certain values. If those who attempt to interpret the world do so only through the prism of professional ...”

“... park lit with a curious violet effect. An interviewer in Diary of a Young Soul Rebel thinks of David Lynch and Hitchcock in relation to this scene, and certainly those names evoke the right sort of frozen ceriness. But there is excitement in the shot, too – a sense of sexual adventure. The mood is lyrical rather than frightening, and it is into this mood ...”

“... pitiless focus on racialism have ensured that there is scant hiding-place for the undecided. This means that a lot of American clergymen are getting prime time without, for once, having to pay for it by the electronic collection plate. In The Eighteenth Brumaire Marx said, rather aptly, that men learning a new language always begin by translating it back into ...”

“... in a unique position to observe Churchill and the Empire at bay. The worst – and that of course means the best – is yet to ...”

“... as a call to travel widely, sometimes on a quasi-ethnographic mission to encounter the other as a means to decentre the self à la Michel Leiris. In 1939 the Swiss-born photographer Eva Sulzer sailed along the coasts of British Columbia and Alaska, where she documented the old longhouses and totem poles of Indigenous peoples; in 1960 the African American ...”

“... ruling. This happened recently in a case brought against the British government by the Tory MP David Davis and Labour’s deputy leader, Tom Watson. They challenged the government’s blanket power to retain communications metadata, including emails, phone and internet activity, and the lawfulness of the police and other agencies being able to authorise ...”

“... trait – machismo as a mandatory requirement. This is confidence not as an end, but purely as a means, a way of being in the world that we are encouraged to believe will bring forth inevitable results: the Brexit we desire and deserve. Something else has also become apparent. Between 2010 and 2016, it seemed that ...”

“... Almost five years ago the Cape Town publishing company David Philip brought out Way Up Way Out, a novel by Harold Strachan. Some time later I was sent a copy of the book by a friend of Strachan’s in KwaZulu-Natal, where the author himself has lived much of his life. His name on the cover meant nothing to me – though if I had been more quick-witted I might have connected it to his second trial and period of imprisonment during the apartheid years ...”

“... in all) arrived promising that their magic formulae would solve the ‘demographic problem’. The means varied from reducing Israeli control over the Occupied Territories – in fact, the plans put forward by Labour, Kadima, Shas (the Sephardic Orthodox party) and Gil (the pensioners’ party) would involve Israeli withdrawal from only 50 per cent of these ...”

“... garlic, and John Minton’s seductive, and faintly Post-Impressionist, illustrations to Elizabeth David. Brooke, after the war, heads for the Mediterranean as fast as he possibly can, but, being Brooke, he is already deeply nostalgic for his Army days there and strives to reanimate certain epiphanic moments – with no success whatever. In his largely ...”

“... believed – as most did – that all species had been created by the Almighty. The Jesuit Père David, who explored China in the 1860s, was propelled by his quest for God’s wonders, and careless of personal hardship. Exploration was by no means confined to rainforests. Conniff is particularly good on the early history ...”

“... Rather than a ‘narrator’, however, it might make sense to speak of the book having, as David Hayman has suggested of Ulysses, an ‘Arranger’ – ‘something between a persona and a function, somewhere between the narrator and the implied author’. This isn’t an entirely gratuitous comparison: Emerald Germs of Ireland is a more Joycean book ...”

“... and not simply about members of religious orders: Benedictines do not seem to suffer from it. David Knowles wrote a history of the monks and friars in medieval England that was instantly recognised as a masterpiece, but I can’t quite see a Jesuit pulling off something similar – though on a smaller scale John O’Malley’s The First Jesuits ...”

“... but it didn’t cut the numbers coming in. And May’s driving purpose was to cut numbers, after David Cameron had recklessly pledged to bring net annual migration down to the ‘tens of thousands’ from nearly a quarter of a million. Family migration was not the only target – May also capped work permits and student numbers – but the language test was ...”

“... debut and Harold Bloom hailed the arrival of a great original. ‘I think I speak for many,’ David Kalstone wrote, ‘in saying it appeared with that sense of completeness of utterance and identity that must have come with the first books of Wallace Stevens (Harmonium) and Elizabeth Bishop (North and South).’ The book they were talking about was ...”