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“... outstrip the mind’s capacity to hold anything in its proper place. At a Binary Defiance workshop held at the 2015 True Colours Conference, an annual event for gay and transgender youth at the University of Connecticut, the following were listed on the blackboard: non-binary, gender queer, bigender, trigender, agender, intergender, pangender, neutrois, third ...”

“... the sea has won for ever. The land must be defended, the land must be fortified, the line must be held. Or you give in and surrender permanently to the sea. But in nature, there’s no such border. Climate change apart, the line between land and sea moves minute by minute with the tides, the waves, the wind and the multi-year cycles of the moon’s ...”

“... every sign of exemplifying Cyril Connolly’s ‘theory of permanent adolescence’. A nasty David Benedictus-like episode, with prefect ‘Dick’ going too far in wielding the Ground Ash, leads to a new school mandate for the lighter but more efficient cane: much relish here in the details. ‘Dick’ moans to Stephen Spender: ‘Even if I become prime ...”

“... practicality of the genre to which the novel isn’t quite conforming; the danger of cliché is held off by the current of fresh thought Auster applies to an action that in summary might start by sounding overfamiliar. Nashe’s sensibility remains at an ironic distance from the hardball motions he lets himself be caught up in: ‘Nashe understood that he ...”

“... as heat is of flame, whiteness of snow.This last lecture was introduced by the theologian David Tracy, who talked briefly about Derrida’s influence on Christian, Jewish and Buddhist studies. During the applause, a balding, young man made his way to the stage carrying an enormous potted plant, which he presented to Derrida. While the man said he was ...”

“... of breaking with it.’ The father arranged for the bar-mitzvah of Joshua, their eldest son, to be held not in a synagogue but at the Western Wall in Jerusalem, but he was quite strict about what women mustn’t do at the ceremony, in deference to his orthodox kinsmen. This was in 1978, shortly after the Camp David Accords ...”

“... his feelings. It is a curious point of coincidence between Glasser and Gage that they both held their fathers responsible for their mothers’ deaths: Glasser’s from cancer, Gage’s by a Greek Communist partisan firing-squad. Both fathers were gamblers, losers, who, in their only sons’ eyes, had sacrificed their wives to the card table. When they ...”

“... Bob,’ mutters a member of the Band just before the music crashes sublimely in. It is a generally held truth among Dylan admirers that no one writes well about him, though the flow of articles and books is almost unceasing. The selective bibliography at the back of The Dylan Companion runs to almost twenty dense pages. Expositions of Dylan’s life and work ...”

“... to Arab provocations. The political climate was thus generally conducive to the use of force. David Ben-Gurion, a peppery and combative little fellow, personified this militant national mood. His instinct was to let the military have their head and to sidestep the slow-moving machinery of the United Nations. In Hebrew the UN is called Oom, and Ben-Gurion ...”

“... how Princeton actually got around to hiring Blackmur as professor of English, a position he held for twenty years, since in both style and background he was about as unacademic and un-Princeton as one could be. Like Blackmur, Wilson (the two were friends) was largely an autodidact, although unlike Blackmur he did have a good Classical education at the ...”

“... preferred. In post-war France, Raymond Aron saw Tocqueville as the great counter-weight to Marx. David Riesman’s The Lonely Crowd reminded Americans that Tocqueville had feared they would become ‘other-directed’ conformists, incapable of the generosity, independence and energy that democratic government required. In England, Tocqueville’s work was ...”

“... a prototype Civil War Experience. Amazingly, Strong’s Diaries (which cover the period when he held two of the top jobs in British museums, first the directorship of the National Portrait Gallery, then of the V&A) never touch on any of these central issues. Strong’s view seems to be a very simple one. He has no time at all for what he once described as ...”

“... all the way back to the beginnings of the alliance. In other words, there was a worm in the bud. David Reynolds has characterised the origins of the relationship in an illuminating phrase: ‘competitive co-operation’. Alas for the British, the competition was an unequal one, a fact that Churchill himself began to realise during the last two years of the ...”

“... Israeli poet), Yehuda Amichai, Leah Goldberg, Moshe Dor, Shlomo Viner, Dahlia Ravikovitch and David Vogel; Oxford have published Amichai and Carcanet Pagis; Tony Rudolf and Howard Schwarz have recently edited an enormous volume of modern Jewish poetry, which includes a 300-page section on Hebrew poetry.* All these, of course, are in English only. But some ...”

“... and is, besides, the only diary of the war in Whitehall by a senior Labour politician. Dalton held two wartime posts. In 1940 Churchill appointed him Minister of Economic Warfare, in charge of prosecuting the blockade of Nazi Germany. Dalton relished the opportunity of ‘body-line bowling at the Hun’ but the expectation that economic warfare would ...”