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“... of the church, the rise of intolerance, the spirit of the Crusades – blame it on Constantine. David Potter punctures this inflated image. This doesn’t mean he cuts Constantine down to size: far from it. Potter has done something far more difficult. He has examined, with gusto and an unrivalled mastery of detail, the aspects of Constantine neglected by ...”

“... Center that the Rockefellers first commissioned, then destroyed, are now at MoMA again (until 14 May). At the time the show opened, Rivera was acknowledged, along with David Alfaro Siqueiros and José Clemente Orozco, as a leader of Mexican muralism, which was supported by the new government of Alvaro Obregón as a way ...”

“... might be a recognition of that fact. If, however, his resignation is simply to make way for David Davis, then nothing has been learned. The Conservatives would do well to think harder next time: the old xenophobic parochialism which once did so well for them has weakened as the Conservative working class has disappeared. This culture’s disarray can be ...”

“... move from the Chairmanship of the ITA to the Chairmanship of the BBC: an event described by David Attenborough as like Rommel taking command of the Eighth Army. The truth of this whole matter may, I suppose, be indefinitely hidden among rival conjectures, for it is evident from Tracey’s account that at least one ...”

“... Social Democrat parties as to the liking of the Tories. If it has any socio-political value (which may well be doubted), that value is just there – in saying what nobody, of any political party, wants to hear. It follows that worth in poetry cannot be determined by that favoured device of egalitarian politics, the committee: not even when the committee is ...”

“... conversations – but by Helen Pluckrose, James Lindsay and Peter Boghossian, three pranksters who may or may not have ever visited a Hooters but who became internet famous, and soon afterwards New York Times famous, for their comprehensive ridiculing of the standards of editing and peer review at Sex Roles and a whole set ...”

“... can change very quickly, people not so fast; some are liable to find themselves left behind, which may in fact prove the best and truest place to be.This language is not new. It is very old. Here is Joseph Chamberlain, defector and founder of the Liberal Unionist Party, in 1889: ‘We are Liberals and unchanged, even though our leader has deserted us.’ And ...”

“... undermine enthusiasm for any political or social virtues the Revolution might possess. The result, David Bindman writes in his excellent catalogue of the exhibition, was ‘to establish in British consciousness, in place of the myriad complexities of the real French Revolution, a series of simple pictures and stereotypes which have proved virtually ...”

“... intended to be didactic as well as representative.’ Though the things anthologies make happen may be confined to poetry, the representative and the didactic are hard to tell apart. These two anthologies, eclectic, open-minded books, covering the same period if not always the same ground, appeared from big publishers within a month of each other. Each ...”

“... Lawrence is said to have said (although in making Osbert the model for Lord Chatterley, Lawrence may have been seeking to modify his celebration). In the social climate of the late Thirties, it was convenient to forget them, but they had done some things that were worth remembering. Thus, with the Reynolds News affair, the wish to set the Sitwells to one ...”

“... that their spouses will be in the grip of a powerful obsession which they cannot share and which may drive these spouses to their laboratories even on Christmas morning. The passage reminded me of Odile Crick’s complaints about her husband’s prolonged periods of in explicable broodiness. On the question of racism, Medawar reflects on the remarkable ...”

“... hope that, with financial support from the Inman estate, some version of it might be published. David Donald read the manuscript – he says on the dust-jacket that it is ‘the most remarkable diary ever written by an American’ – and recommended it to Harvard University Press, along with the suggestion that Aaron, of the Harvard English Department, be ...”

“... Pauline Kael took against the rainbow at the end of David Lean’s film Doctor Zhivago. It was a ‘disgraceful effect’, she said, ‘a coarse gesture of condescension and appeasement to the Russians’, and she asked if Lean and Robert Bolt would have placed a rainbow ‘over the future of England’. Actually it’s difficult to think of David Lean placing rainbows anywhere much, and more significantly, the mood of the rainbow, if not the actual image, is fully there in Boris Pasternak’s novel, as Russian as you can get ...”

“... back in 1959 and first published in 1980. A comparison between the two books, Vasily’s and David’s, does not do the later one much good. As an outpouring of feeling, and as a series of sombre representations of the condition of modern Israel, To the End of the Land is often impressive, sometimes touching. As a novel it simply does not come off. This ...”

“... helps to have a dad who was a bit (or more than a bit) of a rogue, as, variously, Greer, Ackerley, David Cornwell (a.k.a. John le Carré) and Tobias Wolff did. Ackerley’s left two letters, ‘to be read only in the case of my death’, in which he revealed his ‘secret orchard’: the mistress and three daughters he’d been hiding for many ...”