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“... and ‘broadcast power around the entire planet’. In the spring of 1899 he secured $100,000 from John Jacob Astor IV (later the richest man to drown on the Titanic) for the development of a new lighting system. Disregarding Astor’s expressed intentions, Tesla spent it on moving his entire wireless-power operation to the mountain resort of Colorado ...”

“... Iris Murdoch was not dead before the battle for her memory began. Her husband John Bayley’s first volume of reminiscences, Iris: A Memoir, was published when she was in the later stages of dementia, an undignified, soul-stripping illness whose details Bayley did not spare. After her death in 1999 things sped up ...”

“... Brigade. In recent years there has been a conservative revival, apparent in the reappearance of John Buchan on the shelves, or the clean-cut manly values of Chariots of Fire. Churchill is modish again, and all the more so after the Falklands. Those who followed Southern Television’s series about the Churchill of the 1930s will recognise the extent to ...”

“... Dickens – who can tell what the unconscious of that great novelist may have got up to? – made John Jasper more in love with Edwin than he is with Rosa. I also much enjoyed the essay on Lady Morgan, known as ‘Glorvina’ and author of The Wild Irish Girl (the title is ironic – the girl was an animated and cultivated ...”

“... in it are so troubled, as all Pound criticism has to be. The book’s keynote essay is by Edwin Morgan, who recounts how he spent World War Two ‘sitting in a flyblown tent in the Egyptian desert, waiting for the advance of Axis guns’, and who ‘from that time on ... could never see Pound in an unambiguous light, or think of him as other than the most ...”

“... film a year later, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. He went on to direct Night Must Fall, Morgan: A Suitable Case for Treatment, Isadora, The Gambler, The French Lieutenant’s Woman, Who’ll Stop the Rain?, Sweet Dreams and Everybody Wins. His work has influenced more than one generation of British film-makers, and what he did for the stage ...”

“... her. The scene of the rescue, with both prince and princess practically naked, caused the prudish John Ruskin, a friend of MacDonald’s, to chide him for impropriety and moral danger, but MacDonald seems on this occasion to have taken an honi soit qui mal y pense attitude. Anyhow, the princess is so delighted by the experience that she and the prince spend ...”

“... The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (2015), which was published with blurbs from Elton John, Noam Chomsky, Piers Morgan and Stephen Fry, not exactly a ready-made support group. It has a chapter on Anslinger and Holiday. Hari suggests that the kind of argument I have quoted from the file was an aside – though it ...”

“... One eye on the game below, he chats to his fellow journalists: ‘the pug-nosed, the pug-eared Morgan’, Davidson-Smith (‘overcoated’, ‘deerstalker-hatted’) and Freddie Fredericks, Frank Attercliffe’s aging and alcoholic mentor, and co-author with him of Pindar’s Weekend Round-up, a sports column on the Northern Post. After the match, in the ...”

“... changed the name of Black Boy Lane in Tottenham to La Rose Lane. The new name commemorates John La Rose, who founded the Caribbean publishing house New Beacon Books in 1966. Newspapers made sure to find local residents who were angry about the change: such narratives are well oiled; they spin smoothly into motion. Pollard and her ‘unruly ...”

“... done. Second is the question, still unresolved in Christological debates, which haunts Francesca Morgan’s A Nation of Descendants: what grounds for the claim of kinship do genealogical practices record and what follows from that claim? There is ‘genetic fetishism’, the modern form of the fetishism of blood; the fetishism of eidos (the essence, the ...”

“... plates, which could slide over and alongside one another, as well as diverging. In 1967, Jason Morgan and Dan McKenzie independently worked out how these plates could move about the Earth, driven by Holmes’s mantle convection. Finally, in 1968, Xavier Le Pichon used this work, along with catalogues of the sites of earthquakes, to build a global map of ...”

“... dimensions of most Irish poetry are rarely as pronounced in mainland British verse. Edwin Morgan and George Szirtes are both willing to expand their poetics beyond its traditional range. Morgan has always delighted in maverick experiments both with the typewriter and with scissors-and-paste, and his new book, Themes ...”

“... years at Harvard, in which he becomes an unvalued disciple of his creative writing teacher, Morgan Ames, and his short stint at Balliol as a Rhodes scholar in which he does nothing but sink pints of bitter and have an unsatisfactory relationship with a girl called Eleanor – there is some enjoyable Anglophobia in this second half of the novel. At least ...”

“... deep reasons for admiring The Fountain. I quickly suppressed my almost Pavlovian sneer at Charles Morgan, and realised that what she found in the book is the thing that matters. (Not that this alters my opinion about Charles Morgan, but it made me dubious about the whole business of literary criticism. I remember my own ...”