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“... couldn’t help but look after the weak. Well, not much wrong with such a notion in the black and white, troubled world of the 1940s and 1950s (or even the present one, just for a bit of a rest). After the war, in books but most of all in old movies, these reluctant action heroes became perfect modern exemplars for the likes of Camus, who saw in them a stoic ...”

“... Isis because of its violence. It’s an unusual turnabout: Downing Street more hawkish than the White House. But perhaps that’s of little consequence. In a remarkably frank articulation of London’s subservience to Washington, William Hague said in response to the Isis advances: ‘We will support the United States in ...”

“... don’t like feeling that they are being teased. When Shostakovich repeatedly quotes Rossini’s William Tell Overture in the first movement of the Fifteenth Symphony, is this to be understood as a motif for freedom, as some commentators have speculated? A hint that Shostakovich, like Rossini, had ‘lived slightly too long’, as he suggested in a letter to ...”

“... colourful local characters the narrator meets along the way. This is true of Steinbeck, Kerouac, William Least Heat-Moon in his Blue Highways and so on. Even the insufferable Henry Miller, in his 1945 volume The Air-Conditioned Nightmare, has his unrelieved bombast interrupted by a mechanic in Albuquerque called Dutter. The Maestro and I weren’t doing ...”

“... sublime emotions. In her Original Sonnets on Various Subjects (1799), Anna Seward quoted a ‘Mr White’ from the Gentleman’s Magazine in 1786 who said ‘the style of the sonnet should be nervous, and, where the subject will with propriety bear elevation, sublime.’ Mary Robinson (described by Coleridge as ‘a woman of undoubted genius’, but perhaps ...”

“... and fathers, husbands and wives, daughters and sons; they usually sound like upper-middle-class white people, probably well educated, perhaps artists, writers, academics, translators. She writes about people from her world, the people we expect that she knows. The characters are usually anonymous, but they are never archetypes, they are never meant to ...”

“... editors, ‘I wish to point out to you, an editor of the New Yorker,’ he writes to Katharine White, ‘that Mr West’s review of Augie March is disgraceful … Let us hope that it is only my mental health that is endangered and not that of your readers as well.’ Two weeks later, he is putting on his best shirt for Lionel Trilling. ‘The many ...”

“... then governing the slave refuge colony of Sierra Leone, Zachary, like his fellow abolitionist William Wilberforce, believed the spread of the Gospel was a much greater cause. Blacks should be free to serve their – that is, his – God, and to take their proper places in the hierarchy of humanity that the evangelicals saw as ‘natural’, and essential ...”

“... the sky in Bulatov’s large canvases (‘Glory to the CPSU!’), or the rows upon rows of white rectangles that comprise Komar and Melamid’s ‘Quotation’, where we don’t even need to see the words to recognise a deadened formula. Sorokin’s early texts were displayed at Conceptualist exhibitions and circulated among friends in the form of ...”

“... nominally under Sir Gilbert, but more delicate and more respectful of post-medieval fabric. William Morris’s firm came in to do glass and tiles. Soon he had a separate office and had turned aesthete. Greek Thomson, the Glasgow classicist, encountered him at dinner in 1871, where Scott ‘made his appearance in black knee breeks black silk stockings ...”

“... history,’ Stewart muses. He wanders into Amara’s World War One cemetery, where a grid of white crosses and an Indo-Muslim dome sit alongside a rice paddy. His distant predecessor St John Philby (father of Kim), who acted as political officer in Amara ninety years ago, still enjoys a local reputation. Another sheikh fondly remembers one ‘Mr ...”

“... an assiduous treasurer of the Liberal Club, and his subsequent gruelling stint as an assistant to William Beveridge was a formative professional and political experience; they parted company just before Beveridge started work on the report that appeared, to unexpected public jubilance, in 1942. By then Wilson had joined the cohort of clever young men ...”

“... ditched, the elite blended imperceptibly with the masses. Moreover, as Marx recognised, and as William Reddy elaborated in Money and Liberty in Modern Europe (1987), by legislating that feudal rights could be redeemed through cash compensation, the revolutionaries consecrated money as the universal equaliser. The trappings that made wealth legible had ...”

“... alliances, Fit an apartment for your eastern hostage, extol in basalt Your father, praise with white festoons the goddess your lady; And for your death which will be mine prepare An encasement as if of solid blood.Whether or not such buildings and monuments end up being commissioned and built, the speaker is able to present his identity and art as ...”

“... felt that they alone endured a calvary of pain when their bellicose compatriots handed out white feathers or sang jingo songs; in the Second World War, however, ordinary citizens often faced death by bombing at a time when many soldiers were still tucked up in rural training camps, far from harm’s way. As the line between civilian and combatant ...”