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“... has become everything. This is a man who has written just as convincingly on Don DeLillo as on John Donne, on Kazuo Ishiguro as on Joachim of Flora. But then this is one way of thinking of his special gifts as a critic. Nothing is a ‘field’ for him, there are no fences or trees in the way. The main army can camp anywhere; the avant-garde can camp ...”

“... Spanish archival material, Economic Relations between Nazi Germanyand Franco’s Spain (1996) by Christian Leitz and Franquismo y Tercer Reich (1994) by Rafael García Pérez, though the latter focuses on the period of the Second World War. The topic is also covered in nearly all of the major histories of the Spanish Civil War. It is simply wrong to ...”

“... time: Cyril Radcliffe served on the Boundary Commission for India, while the egregiously indolent John Sparrow would shortly be asked if he would provide a constitution for Pakistan, a request about which he made the characteristic observation, ‘Declined: too busy with my practice at Lincoln’s Inn.’ A fellow of an earlier generation, Viscount ...”

“... terrorism, legitimising more and more suspensions of legal and other rights? The ominous aspect of John Ashcroft’s recent claim that ‘terrorists use America’s freedom as a weapon against us’ carries the obvious implication that we should limit our freedom in order to defend ourselves. Such statements from top American officials, especially Rumsfeld and ...”

“... out of Van but also for ‘rescuing’ the Armenians by transforming their ancient, afflicted Christian kingdom into a modern Soviet Socialist Republic. He told people in America either that he was Russian – sometimes that he was Maxim Gorky’s nephew and Kandinsky’s student – or that he came from the Caucasus. En route to their transatlantic ...”

“... an express elevator. It is a cultivated essence of shop-window shrines and Pentecostal chapels (John Wesley with tambourines, lugubrious and off-pitch). Its own particular harsh pure green is raised and reinforced until it becomes an architecture. It is to green what a snowball is to white, an impactment. Although Brainard was raised a Methodist, these ...”

“... his image as a ‘loveable, fantastical Jewish genius from Vitebsk’ (Clement Greenberg)? Crypto Christian or too Jewish? During the last decades of his life, Chagall was among the most public of public artists. He created murals for New York’s Metropolitan Opera and painted the ceiling for the Paris Opera; his mosaics embellished the First National Bank ...”

“... long life. On the one hand, there was the solid evidence provided by the longevity of the early Christian desert fathers – hunger artists who were supposed to eat only enough to keep life going – while, on the other, the ‘theory’ implied by the image of the candle was that the lower the flame, the longer the candle lasted. And so Caloric Restriction ...”

“... Riders, the first book he appears in. His fiancée, Helen, spends all her savings on an Augustus John drawing of a horse for his wedding present. She gives him it, goes to answer the doorbell, and when she comes back fifteen minutes later finds him looking at the drawing with satisfaction. ‘That’s better.’ ‘What?’ said Helen. Then, noticing a ...”

“... the aftermath of Castle Bravo, a 15-megaton hydrogen bomb that was exploded over Bikini in 1954, John Anjain, a magistrate from nearby Rongelap, reported that ‘women gave birth to creatures that did not resemble human beings: some of the creatures looked like monkeys, some like octopi, some like bunches of grapes.’A little north of the equator, and just ...”

“... animals, but rather those active in international work, pre-eminently Oxfam but also War on Want, Christian Aid, Save the Children and a few others. Sasson has interesting things to say about the way in which these charities’ international aid projects came to affect social policy within Britain, but the voluntary sector tout court is not her subject. Once ...”

“... capitalists’ internationalism is suspicious and effete, their cosmopolitanism is a danger to Christian nationalism, and their efforts to wean the world from fossil fuels so that they can make more money from renewables only delay the end times.The epitome of woke capital is Arif Naqvi, a private equity multimillionaire and ardent global free-marketeer ...”

“... grew up in a working-class, largely Armenian quarter of Beirut, until his family was expelled by Christian militias at the beginning of the civil war in 1975. They resettled in the south, in the village near Tyre where his father had been born. Nasrallah shared his father’s admiration of the Iranian-born cleric Musa al-Sadr, whose Movement of the Deprived ...”

“... Administration. The great cult film of all time in this respect is George Axelrod’s and John Frankenheimer’s The Manchurian Candidate, withdrawn from circulation after the Kennedy assassination but now available again in cassette form. And the great artistic and emblematic coincidence of the movie is the playing of the good guy by Frank Sinatra ...”

“... articulate. Biographers don’t forget the history of himself that Dryden was to have given John Aubrey, but that he never gave. Dryden adapted Shakespeare, out of confidence and from a sense of necessity. I have chosen Hamlet as a point of comparison between them – a comparison, after all, provoked by Dryden himself – for a reason best given by ...”