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“... The easy truism, that a good children’s book is a book that’s good for children too, has enough truth in it to ensure that most fiction reviewers are at least open to the genre. But unless we specialise in children’s fiction, the current literary theory about it is likely to interest only some and only at specific times: those of parenthood and of grandparenthood ...”

“... rereading her favourite childhood books: series fiction about daring girl detectives, especially Nancy Drew. Admitting to such low tastes in the Seventies was like confessing a fondness for Hello! magazine today. Graduate schools regarded an interest in popular culture as a sign of intellectual frivolity, and demanded Leavisite vows (or appearances) of ...”

“... last winter. The lodgings, a terraced dwelling of colossal proportions on the Hoe, was once Nancy Astor’s town house. She left it to the nation, and it is now let out to visitors in all its glory by the city council; though I can’t believe that the ensuite bathroom, where the bidet has a jet resembling Lake Geneva’s, is as it was in her day. A ...”

“... by the House should have been the basis for an aggressive campaign, but the Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, allowed the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, to take it hostage and Biden, mumbling through the two presidential debates, never really crusaded to free it. Meanwhile, the third-quarter employment figures, however misleading, gave Trump an ...”

“... no excessive enthusiasm for the darker side of his material, either in the abandoned Iraqi torture chambers of Kuwait City or on the road to Basra. Michael Kelly is a remarkable war artist, however. His reports have an artist’s sense of occasion, and even of genre: portrait, landscape with figures, life class and so on. Drafting and sketching at enviable ...”

“... notably the ‘QAnon shaman’, Jake Angeli, a tattooed, shirtless man who strutted through the chambers of the Capitol with horns on his head and red, white and blue paint on his face. And then there were the neo-Nazis, white supremacists and militia members, the ‘fine people’ of Charlottesville. For all their shouts of ‘USA, USA,’ they represented ...”

“... Isaiah Berlin’s 1953 book to characterise the world’s thinkers as hedgehogs or foxes; from Nancy Mitford two years later to distinguish between U and non-U. From across the Atlantic came David Reisman’s The Lonely Crowd, which taught us to separate modern man into the two camps of the inner directed and the other-directed. This way of observing the ...”

“... Making reference to the rich variety of coup-like phenomena identified by the political scientist Nancy Bermeo, Runciman notes how many of them involve the payment of ‘lip service’ to democracy, or at least to its simulacrum, whether by way of ‘election-day vote fraud’, ‘promissory coups’ by groups that then use elections retroactively to justify ...”

“... children and all women with children were sent to the right, to a truck that took them to the gas chambers. The story of Ida Fensterszab is set out in two pages, between the picture of a plump, well-dressed girl of ten or 11, barely pubescent, standing with her well-dressed, stolidly bourgeois parents in 1939 or 1940, and that of the more knowing ...”

“... a pang of anxiety about some errant bubble getting into a vein and circulating fatally into the chambers of the heart. Humphry, having taken medical advice, is sceptical about air injection, as either efficient or productive of the ‘gentle death’ he favours. Much more is required than the bubble of suicide folklore. In fact, so much air is needed to ...”