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“... passion is political’. For example, when in Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness Stephen Gordon joins an ambulance unit on the Western Front, she travels into France, and into a future in which lesbianism has ceased to be a stigma. ‘Later on would come bitterness, disillusion, but never again would such women submit to being driven back to their ...”

“... David Craig has an unfashionable concern with truth-telling in fiction. In his earlier role as a literary critic, he wrote a book called The Real Foundations in which he showed how some of the most respected 19th and 20th-century novelists and poets had blatantly falsified social reality. If a work of realistic fiction is to be convincing in general, according to Craig, it ought to convince us in particulars ...”

“... Militant Modernism by Owen Hatherley, One-Dimensional Woman by Nina Power and The Meaning of David Cameron by Richard Seymour, all of which grew from their authors’ blogposts. Such works amounted to ‘a kernel of a whole new left public’, according to another of Fisher’s friends, Jeremy Gilbert, professor of cultural studies at the University of ...”

“... Joseph Priestley, and perhaps Edmund Law, need no introduction. But William Worthington and John Gordon have not previously been placed in the august company of the Humes and Priestleys. Worthington figures briefly in the DNB and Williams’s Eminent Welshmen, but is not a household name even among historians of Georgian ideas. John ...”

“... a pride of publishers, producers, stars and ancient European aristocrats – something like the David Frost Show done by Visconti. Everyone is beautiful except the gossip columnists, and they have all the appropriate faults, from kinky tastes in sex to bad spelling and worse usage: ‘But the daisy chain ... was only just gathering speed. It was still a ...”

“... government to power.’ (Nor a Labour one, for that matter; the turning point for me came when David Miliband claimed that they’d been ‘punished enough’ for the Iraq War: ‘Well, you haven’t actually been voted out of office,’ I growled.) The gloom quickly gave way to a sense of the advantages. For a start the voters might have fallen a little ...”

“... Good now extends this fine line of wit even further: Here is a list of the people that Andrew and David have hitherto regarded as talentless, overrated, or simply wankers: Oasis, the Stones, Paul McCartney, John Lennon, Robbie Williams, Kingsley Amis, Martin Amis, Evelyn Waugh, Auberon Waugh, Salman Rushdie, Jeffrey Archer, Tony Blair, ...”

“... drama and political critique associated with American documentary photography of this period (Gordon Parks’s protest shots, Robert Frank’s The Americans, Diane Arbus’s weirdos), wouldn’t be worth the film it was shot on – but it was different for Roy DeCarava. Hallway (1953) is a photo about nothing except a dark, empty corridor in a Harlem ...”

“... But by the time Darius Khondji’s high-definition cameras find him, four minutes into Douglas Gordon and Philippe Parreno’s film Zidane: A 21st-Century Portrait, ‘Zizou’ is already sweating. Every few seconds, he blows the droplets away from his mouth; they collect and drip from his earlobes and his chin. There is no impression of effort – there ...”

“... The story can fairly be summarised since its meaning and power are vested in the telling. It is David Plante’s manner that will attract or alienate readers. The Country exemplifies a mode of contemporary writing almost sufficiently distinct to constitute a genre. The defining characteristic of a novel of this kind is that it seems to consist substantially ...”

“... Hallam, Macaulay, Stubbs, Maitland and Dicey, and by multitudes of lesser authors such as David Lindsay Keir, the son of a Scottish Presbyterian minister. Keir’s workmanlike Constitutional History of Modern Britain since 1485 went through nine editions between 1938 and 1969, and was both a celebration of how government in the UK was ‘conducted by ...”

“... services. But the Treasury can hardly be accused of being self-deceived by acting in this way: Gordon Brown is not like those 16th-century Spanish monarchs who insisted that the interest payments on their debts should be left off their accounts because they found it too demeaning to be reminded of them. Brown is attempting to fund a public investment ...”

“... immediately after the war, conditions in Britain, especially in the cities, were pretty grim. As David Kynaston tells it, people were exhausted, low in spirits, their resources depleted, and over everything there hung the threat of another, probably terminal war. The dawn of the postwar era was cold and dark and bleak, but there was a touch of pink in the ...”

“... in particular, without whose endorsement the assent of the people cannot be assured. If either Gordon Brown or Tony Blair needs to summon the British electorate out of their armchairs in order finally to see the other off, then he will. But otherwise we probably shouldn’t wait by the phone. The Daily Mail has taken advantage of this hiatus in the high ...”

“... the Border hills near Beattock on the way to South Uist and Barra. At Oban I’ll rendezvous with David Paterson, a landscape photographer, who’s working with me on a book on the Highland Clearances. As I overtake a worn blue Audi estate, I look sideways and see Dave’s face and grizzled beard. We exchange incoherent signs, pull in a little later on the ...”