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“... it adversity, that such beauty does exist.’ Baraka made the observation in his liner notes to John Coltrane’s album Live at Birdland, which includes ‘Alabama’, an elegy for the four girls murdered in the 1963 Birmingham Church bombing.I thought of Baraka’s words at New York’s Riverside Church last Saturday, at the funeral of the alto saxophonist ...”

“... Oxford philosophy was a competitive business; there were certain prizes that one had to win, the John Locke Prize, the All Souls Fellowship; but Ayer’s fate was to be pipped by his contemporaries, Isaiah Berlin, Goronwy Rees and the slightly younger J.L. Austin. As an undergraduate he had been taken up by Maurice Bowra and acquired a certain celebrity by ...”

“... in Reich’s work its ideological justification, and he once referred to himself as Reich’s ‘John the Baptist’. His many books are littered with references to Reich’s concepts of ‘character armour’ and ‘self-regulation’. Reich, in turn, saw Neill’s project as a practical test of his ideas, and he sent his own son to Summerhill for a ...”

“... In the America of Russell Banks’s novels, men risk ruin to buy a new speedboat. A man who punches his wife tells himself he’s not actually a wife beater. Drunk driving is just one of those ‘little things’, but speaking French is not allowed. A paedophile rapist starts crying when his stepson turns him down, and a schemer with a ‘system for beating the system’ offs himself in a Cadillac he can’t afford; when his brother discovers the body, the ‘neatly typed’ suicide note reads: ‘I’m a failure ...”

“... Arms. (The reproduction ‘made such an impression on me and so many others of my generation’, John Richardson later wrote.) The painting was shown in a Mayfair gallery, where it was bought by Michael Sadler, whose collection included work by Kandinsky, Rouault and Modigliani. Bacon’s next ambitious work was called Wound for a Crucifixion. ...”

“... John Betjeman was the voice of postwar Englishness: at best, humorous, quirky and enthusiastic about some of the oddest things; at worst, parochial and smug shading into bitter. How ironic, in view of later developments and the argument of Timothy Mowl’s book, that Nikolaus Pevsner’s first visit to England, in 1930, was to research a new topic: Englishness in art ...”

“... The first Catholic to become Lord Chief Justice of England was Charles Russell, in 1894, a man whose benignly Victorian image looked down on me almost every day of my teenage life. He was by a long way my Dublin secondary school’s most famous old boy from the days before Independence and his portrait hung in the school hall ...”

“... As its title so obviously shows, the main thesis of Russell Miller’s book is that L. Ron Hubbard, inventor of Dianetics and founder of Scientology, was all his life an incorrigible liar. That being the case, it is a pity that the book starts off with a statement which sounds hypocritical at best. ‘I would like to be able to thank the officials of the Church of Scientology for their help in compiling this biography ...”

“... the rescue of the latest female recruit, Irene Cooper Willis, by introducing her to Bertrand Russell. Ottoline decided Irene could be more usefully employed in providing Russell with children, but Irene, while happy to act as his research assistant, preferred not to stand between ...”

“... spring and by the imprisonment of the Crown’s principal critics within it. The lecture by Conrad Russell, the dominant historian of the politics of the period, found no place for such sentiments. To him the substance of early modern Parliamentary activity lies in the grind and details of the legislative process, not in the declamatory gestures of the ...”

“... if I had to do it all again          I wouldn’t.          John Berryman said that: I’m not saying it. And just as, when those two blokes came to replace the boiler, and asked would I like to pay cash and I said ‘Nee probs’ –          and watched them carry gear in from the obligatory once-white van ...”

“... marriage he continued to philander,’ ‘he became her lodger and later her lover,’ ‘Bertrand Russell was among her lovers,’ ‘a curious relationship between two bisexual people’, ‘their association precluded neither of them from amorous adventures,’ ‘her reputation was not above reproach,’ ‘a curiously amicable ménage à trios’, ‘he ...”

“... conscious of these possibilities and the forces that hinder and deny them.’ A generation later, Russell Jacoby the American cultural critic and one-time Marcusian, borrows – without acknowledgment – Marcuse’s title for his own consideration of the state of utopia. But rather than proclaiming that its end is at hand because its realisation is nigh, he ...”

“... the ‘gunpowder plot’ and literary impostor (a category not yet extinct). In the latest volume John Stone-house appears as politician and confidence trickster, but Harold Philby is dubbed Soviet agent rather than traitor and Klaus Fuchs gets by as theoretical physicist. Other less controversial occupations include entrepreneur, man of letters, geologist ...”

“... or deepen my grasp of human possibility, as in their different ways the history of Thomas More or John Milton does. The extant marks of Shakespeare’s mortal passage don’t tell us anything we don’t already know about the world or the human. The works – various and ambiguous as they are – tell us something about both; the life doesn’t. Instead, far ...”