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“... off. Nationalists, however, are as skilled as any at shooting themselves in the foot, or even more vital parts: the SNP walked out of the Scottish Constitutional Convention at its opening meeting. Such is the bloody-minded failure to co-operate which arouses Tom Nairn’s most scornful satire in an essay outstanding in a collection which is lively but ...”

“... intellectuals. This is the question of whether and how much to torture a prisoner in possession of vital information that would save lives but only if revealed promptly. (Gonzales found parts of the Geneva Convention’s provisions and legal protocol ‘quaint’ in the light of the need to ‘quickly obtain information … to avoid further atrocities’.) A ...”

“... including the charismatic sculptor and Bloomsbury habitué Stephen Tomlin, and the novelist David Garnett, whose publishing connections were to prove invaluable. Now in her late twenties, Warner was hungry for new experiences. In July 1922, while she was browsing in the cheap section of Whiteley’s Department Store in Bayswater, she noticed a map of ...”

“... the possibility that a police truncheon had been responsible for Peach’s injury. Professor David Bowen (in Cass’s terminology, Person R), who carried out the original post-mortem, and Professor Keith Mant, who carried out a subsequent examination on behalf of the family, agreed on this. Mant noted that the blow had split Peach’s skull but not his ...”

“... In September 1992, David Mellor resigned from the government after concern over an extra-marital affair and a free holiday in Europe. An affair also accounted for Mr Tim Yeo in early 1994. Soon after this resignation, Lord Caithness resigned following the suicide of his wife, which apparently was the result of an affair he had been conducting ...”

“... gratifying that people die while watching it, round and round for ever, in an endless loop. David Foster Wallace always had trouble finishing his novels. And yet he put in this one a thought so absorbing and delightful that you could easily imagine yourself, like the rat in the experiment, pressing the lever over and over. ‘Thousands of times an ...”

“... unwashed, slags staggering around the streets looking like mere labourers, artisans, then it is vital to acquire the status bestowed by top dollar tailoring. Villains, fighters, crooners: their privileged uniqueness is necessarily reinforced by suits cut with all the precision of samurai armour. The alpha males, enforcers trading on reputation, need an ...”

“... shout their presence (the radically different visual effect of the original is illustrated in David Norton’s The King James Bible: A Short History from Tyndale to Today, as well as in Campbell’s own Bible, another history of the KJB). It’s a pity, but the change emphasises just how remote the modern ‘King James’ Bible is from its original. It ...”

“... with the two most striking works of the English critic who writes best about the American cinema. David Thomson’s magnificent Biographical Dictionary of the Cinema (1975 – revised edition, 1980) and his lurid Overexposures: The Crisis in American Film-Making (1981) are the work of an intellectual who loves and distrusts films. Throughout Overexposures, he ...”

“... post 13 years earlier. He died, aged 82, only six months after I glimpsed him. On the cover of David Ellis’s Memoirs of a Leavisite he is photographed standing with a tree and a bench behind him in (according to the jacket info) the very garden into which he escaped that autumn afternoon. He is wearing the same literary-critical uniform too: the baggy ...”

“... into a wide range of matters of public interest, from the Aberfan disaster to the death of David Kelly, Profumo to tabloid phone hacking. On 15 June 2009, Gordon Brown announced an inquiry into the Iraq war – to investigate, as Sir John Chilcot, the inquiry’s chairman, put it, ‘the UK’s involvement in Iraq, including the way decisions were made ...”

“... he was playing an important role in the Cold War, using his network of contacts to open up vital channels of communication. At one point he hoped he might be instrumental in resolving the Cuban Missile Crisis. He liked to offer his services to governments and spymasters as well as crocked celebrities. He was, Davenport-Hines insists, a kindly man. Most ...”

“... wrote of the PR editors in 1969. Their notion that journalistic criticism was the highest and most vital calling for a non-fiction writer wasn’t new either. At first, they struggled to find their own enthusiasms. They were tired of Hemingway, very slow to warm up to Faulkner and conventionally dismissive of Virginia Woolf. Rahv, 1943: ‘There is a crucial ...”

“... it tells is that of the Anglo-Irish property-owning class: from Cromwellian origins through a ‘vital, growing, magnetic’ development during the 18th century to a gradual and mostly inglorious decline into siege mentality. A class, she observed, ‘like a breed of animals, is due to lapse or become extinct should it fail to adapt itself to changing ...”

“... impulse’: a belief that the ‘gaiety of invention’ afforded by language can serve as a vital resource for those who have to ‘get by in a world that on average is absurd and at worst feels like a trap’.There​ is a moral, social and perhaps even political point to the gaiety. The complication Klawans has mined to greatest effect is the sense of ...”