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“... for what amounts to their economic policy. The Fund, and to a lesser extent the other Bretton Woods institutions, tend to secrecy. In large part this is because they are dealing every day with information confided to them by member governments. But it is also a result of their hieratic mode of operation; at the IMF, in particular, criticism tends to be ...”

“... paying a price for it in the form of global warming, acid rain and so forth. Over a century ago, John Ruskin was arguing that Cartesian (‘modern’) thought had destroyed man’s reverence and wonder in the face of the external world, and that the death of God-in-nature would eventually bring the end of nature. Gore’s book is squarely in this ...”

“... of a ‘new world-epoch’, but the death of an old one: Natty is in his seventies, and Indian John, as Chingachgook is called by the residents of Templeton, a frontier settlement based on the Cooperstown of the novelist’s childhood, is a sad shadow of the Mohican warrior he once was, especially in the Christmas tavern scene in which he partakes a little ...”

“... of a German-controlled Europe made such detachment harder to sustain. As the liberal historian John Thompson shows in A Sense of Power, it was neither the threat that the Germans and Japanese posed to the US mainland that drove the country into the war, nor the imperative to secure international markets, since the US economy in the 1940s was overwhelmingly ...”

“... romances. Except that his stetson is genuine, off-highway dude store, and his Tales from the Texas Woods (1997) were published in Austin and composed in Bastrop, in a Greek Revival mansion that once belonged to Joseph Sayers, a former Governor of Texas. Such are the cultural jump-cuts of a career begun as a teenager when Moorcock hacked out Tarzan ...”

“... in its home market, and it comes to the British reader with a warm endorsement from exile Donald Woods. The main contention of A Separate Development is that apartheid is a laughing matter. It presents itself as a comic monologue, delivered by Henry Moto. Moto, as we first meet him, is a coloured who passes for white. Later he is a white who masquerades as ...”

“... late afternoon when the long shadows of its 19 slender arches are projected onto the meadows and woods on either side of the river. To walk along the towpath is an excitingly vertiginous experience: in my mid-seventies, with my head for heights no longer what it was, I’m not sure I’d care to try it again. One thing that Julian Glover, the author of this ...”

“... their descendants continued to live in this area and may rest in this same ground, next to these woods and these fields covered with rocks they never quite succeeded in clearing. Northern New England is beautiful in the fall. The leaves turn pretty colours and the days tend to be bright and mild. Once the rains come and the trees and gardens turn bare, one ...”

“... of ‘guidebooks for the spirit of individualism’, as Robert Faggen puts it, attracted to empty woods and roads less travelled, and suspicious of New Deals and other easy offers of a lift. But real individualists don’t read guidebooks, and Frost wasn’t writing them. On receiving the Emerson-Thoreau medal in 1958, he thanked his hosts with the mildly ...”

“... like Beaverbrook who ‘failed to secure the re-election of Churchill in 1945’. The entry on John Masefield strikes a new note. ‘In “Sea Fever” he wrote: “I must go down to the seas again, to the vagrant gipsy life,” but, in fact, he had settled in London, and in 1907 began to work on the Manchester Guardian.’ Naturally one turns to Yeats to ...”

“... then who is left to man the supposedly overbearing metropolis, unless it is Kingsley Amis and John Betjeman? The ramparts so frailly manned should have given way long ago to the armies massed against them. What Crawford doesn’t realise is that this indeed has happened; he is sounding the bugle for an assault on a fortress that surrendered years ago. The ...”

“... the tradition of legal sanctuary clung on until James I finally ended it in 1623. A decade later, John Ford used sanctuary as a plot device in his play The Chronicle History of Perkin Warbeck (1634). Warbeck was a pretender who claimed to be Richard, Duke of York, one of the princes in the Tower murdered by Richard III. The new king, Henry VII, refers to ...”

“... a twisted version of the Nativity in which a child is conceived in incest, abandoned in the woods, sought for months by his mother, and eventually murdered in front of his father by a man who slits his throat. In Child of God (1973) McCarthy imagined a serial murderer and necrophiliac who abducts his unwitting victims mid-coitus from parked cars and ...”

“... support to most of the claims being made for ‘narrative poetry today’ – should have told John Haffenden in an interview for Viewpoints that he found Robert Frost’s fable of imagined unlived lives, ‘The Road Not Taken’, exemplary. If Fenton’s distinction between the narrative kinds is just, so is the note of regret and rebellion that he ...”

“... successfully – most recently in a triumphant Broadway True West, with Philip Seymour Hoffman and John C. Reilly alternating the two main roles – and last year also saw the publication of the very useful Cambridge Companion to Sam Shepard.* But his later plays have often seemed clotted, hyper-masculine, forced, and his ventures into movie direction – Far ...”