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“... that literature is a watershed, carrying its figments on many currents, into many aquifers and wells, because the humanities have been coming under attack: we’re told that they’re not useful, that literary studies and practice are idle and luxurious irrelevances in a modern society driving towards economic growth. The riposte to this is: narratives ...”

“... rather than a Conservative from the Shires; he’s also said to have voted Green in 2001. Michael Gove, another ally, is not a toff either and would fit in well at a neocon thinktank. With the help of an earlier generation of Tory modernisers, and a core group of Old Etonians and 1990s Central Office staffers, these men have set about giving the party ...”

“... based on some classic text, preferably Shakespeare; when involving some OK modern author, H.G. Wells, Maugham, Greene, Huxley or the like; when starring players famous in the legitimate theatre, Olivier, Richardson, Laughton: or when wrapped in a European reputation, such as Garbo’s or Dietrich’s. Citizen Kane may not have been the first film to break ...”

“... the eyes of the police Christian Cooper would be guilty until proved innocent. In fact, as Ida B. Wells pointed out in 1895, black women ‘have always had far more reason to complain of white men in this respect than ever white women have had of Negroes’: one of the engines for maintaining the supply of slave labour was the rape of black women. (The fact ...”

“... as a routine or mannerism goes back a long way in Heaney (to those early poems about digging and wells, which double as allegories of writing), and it does not vanish in such theoretically wised-up poems as ‘Alphabets’ in The Haw Lantern, however restrained the poet’s verbal palette had meanwhile become. As a result, the charge that he wasn’t saying ...”

“... 1952 choked bankers and paupers alike (it brought a performance of La Traviata at Sadler’s Wells to a close because no one could see the stage). In the years immediately after the war, conditions in Britain, especially in the cities, were pretty grim. As David Kynaston tells it, people were exhausted, low in spirits, their resources depleted, and over ...”

“... and animating relationship between the English and their past (his friendship in the 1930s with Michael Oakeshott may have played a part here): ‘Let us praise as a living thing the continuity of our history, and praise the whigs who taught us that we must nurse this blessing – reconciling continuity with change, discovering mediations between past and ...”

“... modern science, water is H2O, a compound of two elements, but the water in rivers, lakes, seas and wells, let alone the stuff that flows from household taps, is never pure. Water dissolves and contains bits of all the things it has passed through over millions of years: inorganic minerals like the salts (chlorides, sulphates, carbonates) of ...”

“... homily, a quasi-secular point in the mass. But it didn’t work out that way. A protester called Michael Petrelis stood up on a pew and started shouting. Another activist, Tom Keane, received the host, then impulsively crushed it and dropped it on the floor. Schulman was in the cathedral that day, although she doesn’t use her experience as a lens through ...”

“... shelves like a university course: Laing, David Stafford-Clark, Erving Goffman, Vance Packard, Michael Argyle, C.J. Adcock, Viktor Frankl. And more and more. They were all over the house, on tables, on the floor. She bought them, I bought them, Peter and his friends bought them. Somehow they were cheap enough for the smallest allowance. All these were read ...”

“... language. The colours were too bright perhaps.7 March. Read and enjoy Edgelands by Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts about the lure of in-between places and the edges of cities and other communities. I feel I was on to this years ago in my play The Old Country, when Hilary, a spy in the Foreign Office, describes the venues where he met his Soviet ...”

“... told me, ‘has to be converted, in the most organised fashion, into hundreds and thousands of gas wells. It’s like the original oil era. They’ve tricked a lot of public land by offering inducements that haven’t been followed up on. It’s rocks and hard places for everybody, in terms of energy, from now on.’ The windscreen of the hired car detaches us ...”

“... started a new album, ‘EGYPT’. On the first page, a collage of stamps of King Farouk, who, like Michael of Romania, was a boy at his accession. The stamps are the first issue of his reign, designed in 1937. Later in the album we find the revised design of 1944, by which time Farouk was 24 and wearing a manly moustache on his rather pudgy face. The Farouk ...”

“... he said, ‘has to be converted, in the most organised fashion, into hundreds and thousands of gas wells. It’s like the original oil era. They’ve tricked a lot of public land by offering inducements that haven’t been followed up on.’ Our local frackers have their piggy eyes on the Weald Basin, from Kent to Dorset, and after that they’re ready to take ...”

“... just a master of the political dark arts, he claimed he modelled himself on a Tory predecessor, Michael Heseltine, who had pledged to ‘intervene before breakfast, lunch and dinner’ on the side of British industry. But Mandelson never had a chance to put the case. A few weeks after EDF made its move, he was on the brink of tears, listening to Tony Blair ...”