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“... for the three short years of undergraduate life. One accepts, too, that things were not helped by a tradition in teaching the history of the language that was more than a little offputting, even for those who would spurn any passing passions for ‘relevance’. Preoccupation with Germanic comparative philology some times failed even to get the starred ...”

“... You could not​ stand five minutes with that man beneath a shed while it rained, but you must be convinced you had been standing with the greatest man you had ever yet seen.’ Dr Johnson’s remark on Edmund Burke, related in one of Hester Thrale’s anecdotes, is unforgettable. The greatest Tory of the 18th century takes off his hat and makes the lowest possible bow to the much younger Irish Whig (Burke’s dates are 1729-97, Johnson’s 1709-84 ...”

“... Some years ago, the novelist David Foster Wallace submitted himself to a long television interview with Charlie Rose, the PBS chat-show host. It was a terrific performance, and in it Wallace talked about why, in much of his work, narrative is split into body-text and footnotes: There’s a way, it seems to me, that reality’s fractured right now, at least the reality that I live in ...”

“... 14 May 1948. During its brief imperium in the Promised Land, Britain kept the promise made in 1917 by its Foreign Secretary, Arthur James Balfour, in the Declaration that bears his name, ‘to favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people’. While nurturing the ‘national home’, a term as deliberately vague as Palestinian ...”

“... the man who is accused of the murder of two small girls in Soham, whose deaths, as we now know by his own peculiar account, took place in his bathroom. Since one of the girls is held to have drowned in the bath, the prosecution saw fit to have this detachable part of the crime scene brought into court, to authenticate a pathologist’s testimony, even ...”

“... didn’t mention that. So the stylised definite article has been dropped, and Red Rabbit will be hopping its way up the bestseller lists in a matter of weeks (Michael Joseph, £18.99). Clancy rocketed to fame – the cliché isn’t inapt for such a notorious gizmologist, though he’d no doubt give you the make and serial number of the rocket in question ...”

“... in questionnaires about their reading and dreaming habits, and the numbers have been crunched by Mark Blagrove, a psychologist at the University of Wales, Swansea. It turns out that readers of fiction are more likely than non-readers of fiction to have ‘bizarre dreams’ in which impossible or unlikely things occur. Last night I dreamed that I was an ...”

“... David Lassman, the director of the Jane Austen Festival in Bath (Regency dress parade, bonnet-making workshops, ‘Tea with Mr Darcy’), submitted opening chapters and plot synopses of Austen’s novels to 18 British publishers and agents, changing just the titles and characters’ names. Lassman was ‘staggered’, he told the Guardian, when he received form letter rejections back ...”

“... Auerbach’s Recent Pictures, at Marlborough Fine Art (until 24 October), there may appear to be a compulsive zest. Alleyway and streetscape, seated figure and reclining head, are confidently asserted, eyes jabbed into expression, zig-zag strokes softening edges and sawing up the sides of tower blocks across the Hampstead Road. The zest is illusory ...”

“... When​ you first look at this photograph by Ming Smith, it’s not clear what it is you’re seeing. In the left background is a figure – black pants and white sneakers – drowning in light; the face is invisible, gender indeterminate. To the right, closer to the viewer, is another figure, also of indeterminate gender, also bathed in white light, performing an acrobatic movement, perhaps a dance ...”

“... or, as the bright, low sunlight suggests, the beginning or the end of the day. It might even be ‘one of those bright summer mornings we get in California before the high fog sets in’. Although Hopper was from the East Coast, sentences like the ones I’ve quoted from the opening of Chandler’s The Little Sister, and clips from Hollywood gangster ...”

“... David Runciman, Neal Ascherson, James Butler, T.J. Clark, Jonathan Coe, Sionaidh Douglas-Scott, Daniel Finn, Dawn Foster, Jeremy Harding, Colin Kidd, Ross McKibbin, Philippe Marlière, James Meek, Pankaj Mishra, Jan-Werner Müller, Susan Pedersen, J.G.A. Pocock, Nick Richardson, Nicholas Spice, Wolfgang Streeck, Daniel TrillingDavid RuncimanSo who​ is to blame? Please don’t say the voters: 17,410,742 is an awful lot of people to be wrong on a question of this magnitude ...”

“... a rich story on which to lead, as full of purple prose today as it was twenty years ago. It should be a good day for sales. To the Express, the Mail and the Mirror, sales are important. Together they sold over twelve million copies every day in the early Sixties. Twenty-five years later, they sell not much over half of that, and the Express in particular is ...”

“... Isser Harel made his first official visit to the United States as head of Mossad. Warmly received by Allen Dulles, the director of the CIA, he presented his American opposite number with an ancient dagger inscribed with the words from the Psalms: ‘The Guardian of Israel neither slumbers nor sleeps.’ Like the celestial guardian, Mossad was expected to ...”

“... Two major security challenges confronted the Israeli government headed by Yitzhak Shamir in the second half of 1990: the Palestinian uprising, now in its third year, against Israeli rule in the occupied territories, and the crisis triggered by Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait on 2 August last year ...”