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“... David Owen, Douglas Hurd, Kenneth Baker, David Mellor, Alan Bennett. There are a few outers: Jonathan Miller, Stephen Spender, Alfred Brendel, Melvyn Bragg – but even in these he is good on the hair, which, according to Craig Brown, was what he always homed in on. Rosemary Sayigh, Boxer’s sister, provides the most intimate of the recollections. In ...”

“... scarcely be said to have existed. From the Eighties of the last century right through until the post-WWII National Service years widened the intake, raised the age and lowered the voice of undergraduates, the Footlights was concerned almost exclusively with make-up and drag. Faced with this fact, which the photographs and song-sheets would not have allowed ...”

“... certainly follow this pattern. Adam Gray was a sergeant in the tank regiment in which his friend Jonathan Millantz was a combat medic. There is strong evidence that both committed suicide, although their deaths were ruled accidental by the military. Both talked about their experiences, Adam to his mother (whose memories constitute most of the account of his ...”

“... more revealingly shows the untidiness and uncertainties of a popular upheaval.At the heart of Jonathan Beecher’s Writers and Revolution is a simple but powerful idea: to follow nine contemporary intellectuals – d’Agoult, the novelists George Sand, Victor Hugo and Gustave Flaubert, the statesman Lamartine, the liberal theorist and parliamentarian ...”

“... principles to which he had devoted his career. By 1834, the new Catholic Irish MPs had joined with post-Reform British radicals to demand policy changes in Ireland. Charles found this democratic lobbying unacceptably offensive and resigned. His son and heir subsequently destroyed his own career by developing impractical ‘crotchets’ on the three great ...”

“... leavened by concern for the welfare of its inhabitants, have characterised MI6’s work in the post-war years. As they have, of course, British foreign policy as a whole. The CIA ‘destabilised’ Guatemala; and the British ousted Iran’s Mossadeq, to put the Shah back on the throne and BP back at the oilwells. The CIA changed rulers like shuffling cards ...”

“... are wrong, and those who insist on it are wrong too. It’s not easy to win in such a competition. Jonathan Culler’s job is to portray him as a Modern Master – even Thody speaks of Barthes as a ‘major French writer’ without any sort of qualification – and he does this with subtlety and skill. There are many modes of mastery and Culler suggests ...”

“... Jonathan Meades, for the last thirty years Britain’s most consistently surprising and informative writer on the built environment, has finally published a book on the subject. A volume did appear in 1988 – English Extremists, written with Deyan Sudjic and Peter Cook, celebrating the postmodern architects Campbell Zogolovitch Wilson Gough – but since then his medium has been television ...”

“... village and all. As the place of Churchill’s broken pledge, it became a persistent metaphor of post-war England: a patriotic nation betrayed in its own name. The press wasted no time dubbing Tyneham ‘the village that died for D-Day’, and it soon developed into a national cult. Lord Hinchingbrooke stood up at the 1947 Annual Dinner of the Society of ...”

“... choice is proved by the exceptions: the early portrait of his much-loved wife (he had proposed by post and was accepted, sight unseen) and the early profile of a boy – almost a sketch – which, when he saw it again late in life, he said was the best thing he had ever done. It is clear also from the drawings: not just the portrait drawings, which were ends ...”

“... us about narrative, and what does Genette tell us about Proust? In answer to the first question, Jonathan Culler has written a brief and cogent foreword, in which he develops the substantial claim that Genette has given us the first ‘systematic theory of narrative’. Equally appropriate, and perhaps more congenial to this particular insomniac, is the ...”

“... that you were ‘indisputably a hugely important literary phenomenon’ and not taking any calls. Jonathan Cape’s posture is completely understandable given the current funeral atmosphere in England, but the psychic ramifications of Black Dogs are global in reach, and people we know are calling with questions. This is the reason the London Review has made ...”

“... tell the difference between a civil servant and a merchant of death. Sir Colin Chandler left his post as marketing director of British Aerospace to spend three years at the Ministry as head of the Defence Export Sales Organisation. Then he became chairman of Vickers. Sir James Blyth (later Lord Blyth) was chairman of Defence Sales until he left to join the ...”

“... the modernist and postmodernist masters, these writers – among them Eugenides’s contemporary Jonathan Franzen and a younger cohort that includes Zadie Smith and Dave Eggers – have come to believe that too much was lost – in moral and emotional engagement, in readership – when realism was thrown over. As Franzen wrote in the New Yorker, ‘in ...”

“... Regum Britanniae (c.1136), which Tombs describes as a ‘common Anglo-British epic’ – was a post-Conquest treatment of an earlier phase of creolisation which celebrated the Celtic Britons as the forerunners of the Saxon-Norman English. Medieval England was plagued with baronial wars and rebellions, but ethnicity was rarely the cause of internal division ...”