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“... have been mistaken). Healey, then, was unambiguously a figure on Labour’s right wing, and, as a young MP for a Leeds constituency in the Fifties, he was naturally drawn into Hugh Gaitskell’s circle. The tone adopted towards Gaitskell, however, is pretty cool in these memoirs, which record doubts about ‘whether the fierce puritanism of his intellectual ...”

“... power’ which the fellowship requires you to trust in. Touch’s story is simple enough. A young priest, Juvenal, leaves the Franciscan order and takes up work in the Sacred Heart Rehabilitation Center, a half-way house for recovering drunks. In the course of his samaritan work, he finds himself able to perform healing miracles. Furthermore, he bleeds ...”

“... a seat on Lambeth Council. I had worked for two magazines considered left-wing – Tribune, under Michael Foot, and the New Statesman, under Paul Johnson. It was a different world. In those distant days, Harold Wilson was the Prime Minister. He was being assailed by ‘left-wingers’, people like me, for being too subservient to the United States ...”

“... the catastrophic effect of the dearth has been that the delicate musculatures of many small young throats end up red, raw and knobbled. Managements will pay anything to those prepared to take the risk – with the result that we live in an era of vocal nine-day wonders and early operatic graves. The other fundamental problem is the related one of a lack ...”

“... study can stand by Deryck Cooke’s magisterial I saw the world end (1979) and the long essay by Michael Tanner in the Faber Wagner Companion (1979). The other three recent books are built on shakier foundations. Ewans, the author of a fine study of Janáček’s operas, here traces the allegedly strong Aeschylean influence on Wagner, while Furness and ...”

“... Dylan Thomas, Augustus John, Elisabeth Lutyens, John Lehmann, Louis Macneice, Alan Rawsthorne, Michael Ayrton. In the dark background are the diabolic Bernard Van Dieren and Philip Heseltine (‘Peter Warlock’), two men, composer-writers like himself, to whom Lambert maintained a fierce loyalty, before and after their deaths. Lambert’s cardinal ...”

“... same man. The two most recent books on Traven before Mr Wyatt’s The Man who was B. Traven – Michael Baumann’s scholarly B. Traven: An Introduction and Judy Stone’s journalistic The Mystery of B. Traven – agree that Marut and Traven were the same man. Moreover, Judy Stone, who questioned Torsvan-Croves remorselessly when she visited him, was ...”

“... there are forms of religion, commerce, finance and military action that bear comparison – but Michael Gordin argues that Babel has long been a special problem for science and that science, in turn, has had a special role in coping with it and in trying to overcome it. Scientists wish to, and sometimes need to, communicate with their peers all over the ...”

“... into conspiracy files and no shamanic visitations from crows and reeking foxes. Two ambitious young or youngish American men operating out of the same city, San Francisco, forge an alliance of mutual misunderstanding through a love of words and thirst for fame. The celebrated episode that triggered the telegram took place on 7 October 1955 in the cramped ...”

“... isn’t to discredit all fMRI work, but it does remind me of the story of the German mathematician Michael Stifel, a friend of Martin Luther, who decoded the name Pope Leo X to discover that it represented 666. Stifel received death threats, and Luther hid him, but also asked him to give up on the numerology. Another charming but deflating experiment was done ...”

“... rejected. The poor health of soldiers fighting in the Boer War made the state of the nation’s young men a matter of public concern. The blame wasn’t put on urban poverty, however, but on ‘ignorance on the part of mothers of the necessary conditions of bringing up healthy children’, as Major General Sir Frederick Maurice put it. Declining birth ...”

“... in existential torment, Warhol put pretty-boy idols of mass culture up front, such as the young Troy Donahue and Warren Beatty, Elvis and Brando, all subjects of early silkscreens. More notoriously, he did the same with the not-so-pretty Thirteen Most Wanted Men, the FBI mug-shots that he silkscreened for the façade of the New York State Pavilion at ...”

“... through the extraordinary perspective drawings and watercolours of the buildings which Joseph Michael Gandy produced for Soane. Gandy was a brilliant architectural theorist: he had been a Royal Academy Gold Medallist and was the author of two visionary books on rural architecture, which attempted to bring the cutting edge of neoclassical design to ...”

“... capacity for treating now as if it were as rare and cherishable as then. Montale himself, when a young man, formed a friendship with Svevo which was instrumental in preserving the senior writer’s achievement and making it known to the Italian public. Such friendships are basic to modern Italian cultural history, which has gone through times when a lot has ...”

“... John Francis Byrne, on whom he based the character of Cranly in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, lived at 7 Eccles Street from 1908 to 1910. ‘In 1909, when Joyce was visiting Dublin,’ we are told on page 1144 of the new volume of annotations to Ulysses, ‘he returned with his friend J.F. Byrne late at night to Byrne’s house at 7 Eccles ...”