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“... would, one imagines, be irrelevant. Too cruel from anywhere, as Banquo would say. But such details matter to the demented hero of Redback. Redback is not, the reader will immediately appreciate, a novel for those with an easily tickled gag reflex. Like swimming, it should for safety’s sake be undertaken at least two hours after eating. To his ...”

“... down to printers and publishers: it is self-fulfilling. But did Rastell’s biography and subject matter entangle with a sense of an emerging vernacular vitality? The Stationers’ Company is an expression of a quantity of archival labour and expertise that may never be surpassed: it is a great piling up of new, neglected or (Blayney’s favourite ...”

“... birthday, the point of which was that relations with his old friend were still much the same, a matter of him ‘fitting our lives to your game’:You – the young bow-tied near-albino undergraduateWith rooms on Peck Quad (blinds drawn down at middayTo shut the sun out) – read your poems aloudIn so clinical a voice, I thoughtYou held each word gleaming ...”

“... shameless narcissism’: but, alertly translated by Eisenstein’s former student Herbert Marshall, it is a convincing demonstration of Baudelaire’s idea that ‘the convalescent, like the child, possesses in the highest degree the capacity to take an acute interest in things, even those that seem most trivial.’ In fact, most of the ...”

“... strategically and learn abstract concepts. ‘If one could devise a successful chess machine,’ Herbert Simon and others suggested in 1958, ‘one would seem to have penetrated to the core of the human intellectual endeavour.’ Combine this with its clear measures of success and readily formalised rules, and chess seemed to offer the perfect testbed for ...”

“... in 1990, ‘and his wives were all dull too.’ There was also the obligatory black sheep, Herbert, who drank and lost jobs yet nonetheless managed to do the odd spot of spying along the way (for the Japanese, as it turns out, but still, the important thing is not to be boring, and old Herbert was frightfully ...”

“... awarded a lucrative contract to supply radio equipment to the empire by the postmaster-general, Herbert Samuel. After helping to expose the scandal in the New Witness, Cecil Chesterton was sued for libel by Godfrey Isaacs, and lost. G.K. regarded his brother’s action as heroic, and unhappiness with Cecil’s legal defeat, Oddie argued, explains G.K.’s ...”

“... be more valuable to minor politicians in the Argentine... than it will be to men of vision. A.P. Herbert in the Law Quarterly Review, Vol.44, 1928, came to much the same conclusion: ‘One may well ask whether it was worth while raising the question of British rights, even academically.’ Misleading Cases, in the same volume, gets a better notice. Dr Goebel ...”

“... later developed by Orton and Stoppard, cultural despair variously expressed – for instance, by Herbert Read and Kingsley Amis; and then to the sorts of things about which Appleyard enjoys talking, such as Brutalism and Pop Art. He does not neglect Russell, Ayer, Popper etc; he neglects very little. Indeed the quantity of material he doesn’t neglect is ...”

“... of the best books of the Eighties isn’t enough: it is one of the best books I know, or for that matter, am capable of imagining: a corrosive and uproarious litany of bad sex, bad politics and bad religion: All I could try was turn a sly hurt look to soften her and that night in bed I stuck my winedark tongue inside her bum her blackhaired Irish bum ...”

“... form of the Western nation-state. Africa, in short, was not Wright’s place at all; nor for that matter was Paris. The latter provided a refuge from everything that was intolerable back home. But home, as Campbell puts it, was where ‘he had left his story’. Without nourishment from the source, the creative well, such as it was, dried up: as an ...”

“... commercialisation of the medium. When his company applied for a franchise he wrote revealingly to Herbert Morrison: ‘This does not indicate any change of feeling about commercial or sponsored television: I still think this country would be better off without it. However, if there is to be commercial television in this country, we think we should be ...”

“... grain of the language is often a smoother, less arresting version of that of Edwin Muir or George Herbert. It’s hard to believe most of these poems were written in the last quarter-century. One distinguished contemporary poet scowled when I told him I was reading Jennings’s Collected Poems: ‘Life’s too short.’ As I read, though, I was sustained not ...”

“... I have embraced Islam’. Rushdie’s religious change of heart is, of course, a matter for his own conscience. As a public act, however, it is clearly meant to invite a response. Together with his decision not to permit further translations or a paperback edition of The Satanic Verses, it must surely help to resolve the painful impasse in ...”

“... should be so heedless of grammar, syntax and spelling as to be virtually illiterate, it did not matter for practical purposes: her editor at Gollancz could and did put that right, and the public knew nothing about it. There are other deficiencies, however, that cannot be ignored. The dialogue can be laughably banal, and the style undistinguished at best and ...”