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“... standards of 1889’) and at 14 became a foundation member of the Left Book Club. By 16 he was a Young Communist and soon found the intellectual discipline of Marxism ‘irresistible’. He did all the Left things. When Hitler and Stalin signed their nonaggression pact he saw the Soviet action as ‘sensible, logically defensible and indeed ...”

“... and Mary Karr’s The Liar’s Club, but by 1995 it had generated such florid productions as Michael Ryan’s memoir of sex-addiction, Secret Life, which included a confession even of his inappropriate intimacy with his dog, Topsy. In January 1997, when Moore’s story came out, the publishing world was bracing itself for Kathryn Harrison’s The ...”

“... of the ‘English spirit’ and would therefore counteract the notion that ‘the minds of young women are becoming unEnglish.’ At Oxford there was little support for English studies, but in 1873 English was included in the examinations for a Pass Degree. After a public campaign during the 1880s, a final Honours School of English Language and ...”

“... impervious to Nicky’s homo-erotic appeal: if he has a temptation, it seems to be a matter of young girls. After this clergyman’s mysterious death, Nicky (who is only 16) is taken into the household of a policeman and his wife: they teach him a more healthy way of life, with bird-watching and sensible food. Will Nicky try to seduce either of them? Will ...”

“... through. In one of my ration I found the baptism, on 14 December 1640, of Eaffry Johnson at St Michael’s in Harbledown, a village half a mile outside Canterbury towards which I sometimes feel the fates nudging me, since I had already visited it in the course of Michael Levey’s research for his biography of Walter ...”

“... of snakes; most illegitimate bites are to the arms and upper body (the victims are usually young men with a point to prove), while most accidental bites are to the legs and feet. The mortality rate has fallen considerably over the past half century, with the more widespread availability of anti-venoms and the decline in snake numbers as a result of ...”

“... the Reliance Controls factory at Swindon by the structural engineer Anthony Hunt and the young Norman Foster and Richard Rogers, who were then part of Team 4; and the first hyperbolic paraboloid roof in Britain, created in 1957 by Robert Townsend for the Wilton Royal carpet factory. Townsend’s own house in the otherwise benighted village of ...”

“... a modern world that has nonetheless still to solve many of the riddles it set out to explore. As Michael Ermarth, the editor of the last two volumes of Jaspers’s Great Philosophers, acknowledged a decade ago, ‘there can be no “Jasperism” or doctrinal edifice built on his thinking. As with Socrates, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, his real message is ...”

“... he alternately calls ‘public opinion’ or politics ‘out-of-doors’. Like a number of other young historians, such as Michael Braddick and Phil Withington, he believes that even a divine-right absolute monarchy rested on the consent of the governed. Previous generations of scholars took that consent to be implicit and ...”

“... with paintings like The Luncheon in mind, we might suppose he was setting aside in quotes. Michael Fried summarised the issue in a resounding formula: Manet’s art represents the last attempt in Western painting to achieve a full equivalent to the great realistic painting of the past … To paint his world with the same fullness of response, the same ...”

“... of France died, leaving three sons. But none of them reigned for more than a few years, each dying young. His daughter Isabella, however, married Edward II of England, and they had a son who became Edward III. That was Edward’s claim to the throne of France, by right: Dieu et mon droit, as the royal motto still declares. But it was the son of Philip’s ...”

“... clarity. Written in the aftermath of her affair with the Abstract Expressionist painter Michael Goldberg, it is also the anatomy of a failed relationship, unravelling painfully over ten scenes of exquisitely eloquent monologues and skilfully charged interchanges between a triangle of characters with pastoral names: Damon, Chloris and ...”

“... giorno natale.’ Hardly a joke, in the circumstances it merits a smile, but from this mirthless young man nothing is forthcoming. I lay my head down again. At least I seem to have stopped bleeding. Birthdays were never made much of in our family. Mine, as I told the Italian doctor, is on 9 May and my brother’s too, though he is three years older than I ...”

“... address Stephen Spender, who had known Auden since they were undergraduates, contrasted the young man, Nordic and brilliant, with a ‘second image of Wystan … of course one with which you are all familiar: the famous poet with the face like a map of physical geography, criss-crossed and river-run and creased with lines’. By the early ...”

“... which the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, has ignored. Instead, he is eager to approve a young ultra-right protégé of his, previously rated ‘not qualified’ by the American Bar Association, as a lifetime judge. Although the majority of the one hundred senators are elderly and at risk in such a large gathering, the Capitol’s attending physician ...”