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“... story probably had more left out of it than anything I ever wrote.’ The writer was Ernest Hemingway; the story is ‘The Killers’. For us, the readers, the joke has all kinds of other meanings. One fictional character tells another he should consume more fiction, although in another form. Does this enlarge the illusion, make everything into a ...”

“... of sexual attitudes, modern art, communism, free-thinking and non-conformity (in spite of Ernest, her husband, being a Methodist) were all part of a conspiracy on the part of diabolical forces to destroy the fibre of the nation. Her sworn enemies were broadcasters (the BBC above all), contemporary playwrights, ‘pornographers’ (publishers of all ...”

“... and you think of roses. A jasmine scent, and you think of jasmine blossom. The representations may be better or worse – you may smell a rose perfume and think: this smells nothing like real roses – but they are imitations even so, however pale. The genius of Chanel No. 5, invented by Coco Chanel in collaboration with ...”

“... but has the consequence that aortic aneurysm is classified as a disorder of soft tissue, which may be logically correct but feels out of place. The problem is that any attempt to devise a scheme that is rigorously logical inevitably diverges from the way we actually talk about the world. The point, and the lesson I take from Cantwell Smith’s book, is ...”

“... it can achieve some of its major economic objectives in the process. But the long-term outcome may very well be something that the Government does not anticipate, though I suspect it would not be unduly concerned if it did: a collapse in the maintenance of consent among the governed. If you start from the relatively uncontentious proposition that a ...”

“... Discussing several different ways of viewing the post-1945 history of Europe, he writes: ‘one may, finally, see this phase of history in a European light’ – by implication, all other lights are somehow un-European – ‘and observe how many objective factors have combined with creative acts of will to make possible the first step towards a united ...”

“... gathered from imaginary libraries by fictional scholars; it includes Freud’s ‘Case of Ernest M.’ (whose peculiar complex leads inevitably to his involvement with the Archduke Franz Ferdinand and possibly in his assassination) and Conan Doyle’s ‘Sherlock Holmes’s Final Case’ (which depends on the discovery that a criminal has been ...”

“... heavily pendulous upon the bough, are the fruits of research now offered to us (so very thick, we may say, has grown the ivy elegantly disposed on the present dust-jacket as on the last) that nothing of the kind need be supposed. Mrs Spurling must surely have been at work from the dawn of life, determined to know as much as God himself about Ivy’s ...”

“... frankness’ that he did not rearm because he would have lost the 1935 General Election. 3. Ernest Bevin said of the Labour Party’s relations with the Soviet Union: ‘Left can speak to Left.’ 4. Nye Bevan called Hugh Gaitskell ‘a desiccated calculating-machine’. 5. Rab Butler said: ‘Sir Anthony Eden is the best prime minister we ...”

“... to his Romantic forbears. The method of the book means that we have to attend to a great deal we may have heard before, such as brief expositions of Kant, Fichte, Schelling and Schiller: but it is true enough that the ideology, the pathology and the eschatology of the period under discussion have connections with those thinkers and many others roughly their ...”

“... Antigone’. It is one thing to be Antigone to one’s father, but to be Antigone to his Movement may have been a distraction for Anna as well as a destiny. Oedipus, after all, did not start a new profession. Freud managed to live virtually half his life – what he came to think of as the most significant half – without psychoanalysis. Anna lived her whole ...”

“... of the following kind: Who was Horatio Nicholls? Lya de Putti? Wilkie Bard? Muriel George and Ernest Butcher? Can you at once sing the opening bars of ‘Shepherd of the Hills’ and ‘The Sheik of Araby’? Or ‘Horsie, keep your tail up’ and ‘Does the Spearmint lose its flavour on the bedstead over night’? Did you play the book-list game (The ...”

“... Hamish Malahide, a student of Gödel and Heisenberg who takes a more sanguine view: ‘There may be uncertainties but don’t you think it’s better to live in the full knowledge of this than go on looking for illusory “truths” that can never exist?’ Whatever the tenor, though, the song remains the same. Boyd’s books are rambling, lucid, genial ...”

“... over her recently-acquired fiancé, who has unaccountably disappeared for some weeks and so may well be dead. It takes Holmes a couple of days to show that he is still alive and not at all likely to prove an agreeable husband. This is decidedly no three-pipe problem. Mr Symons’s plot is of a modest near-transparency from the start – a fact cunningly ...”

“... exploits with military trains and Clay was ordered to cool it. The British Foreign Secretary was Ernest Bevin, with the reputation of ‘a fixer and shrewd horse-trader’. His dislike of the Germans (‘I tries ’ard ... but I ’ates them’) had come about, we are told, ‘not as the result of Nazism and the war, but because he could never forgive the ...”