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“... State making an almost identical remark. It is with this episode that the young American scholar Scott Lucas, in the introduction to Divided we stand, opens his meticulously researched and pleasantly written examination of the 1956 crisis seen as a landmark in Anglo-American relations. What started as a PhD thesis has ...”

“... have led one to suspect: some of this is true, some of it questionable and the rest of it false. (Scott Lucas, by contrast, thinks almost all of it true.) Orwell was indeed unsociable, anti-feminist and homophobic, but only ambiguously anti-semitic, and by no means such a dewy-eyed idealiser of the plebs as some have imagined. Both Bowker and Taylor ...”

“... Ridley Scott is always a director to watch. This proposition includes watching for things to avoid, especially when he goes for history and costume, as in 1492 and The Kingdom of Heaven. But there were also The Duellists and Thelma and Louise; and Blade Runner, it seems, is always showing up in a new version. A ‘final cut’, following on the studio cut and the director’s cut, is just out ...”

“... The question of how we are to take Iris Murdoch’s characters (indeed, whether we can take them at all) is raised, even before we get to know them, by their names. In The Green Knight we have to contend with Lucas and Clement Graffe, Harvey Blacket, Bellamy James and his dog Anax, the Anderson women – Louise and her daughters Alethea (Aleph), Sophia (Sefton) and Moira (Moy) – Emil and Clive and the Adwardens ...”

“... Most loyal and protective of Gurney’s many friends, Marion Scott wrote after one of her regular visits to the asylum: ‘Ivor is so heart-breakingly sane in his insanity.’ Letters, reported conversation, music, poems all attest to the fact. He was trained and already admired as a composer before enlistment; in the trenches poetry had occupied him more and more and, when he returned afterwards to music, the poetry continued ...”

“... traveller’s trophy room is not entirely absent: among people specifically celebrated are F.W. Lucas (1842-1932), a local collector of objects made from human and animal remains, and Melton Prior (1845-1910), who brought home trophies and weapons from the places he visited as war correspondent for the Illustrated London News. But many of the masks, totems ...”

“... the frost, he remembers the taeog.’ No doubt he does ... Hand me the dictionaries. In AD 1356, we read that Ieuan’s land might be ‘subject to escheat’, were it not that ‘this is land of the gwely. It passes only in ach ac edryf.’ Such rarities of language disconcert the reader, especially when mouthed by thin characters. Still, the 1356 story is ...”

“... her people,’ Jane Austen’s nephew wrote in his Memoir of his aunt. In this traditionary way we learned that Miss Steele never succeeded in catching the Doctor; that Kitty Bennet was satisfactorily married to a clergyman near Pemberley, while Mary obtained nothing higher than one of her uncle Philips’ clerks, and was content to be considered a star in ...”

“... We all know the story. A brilliant, neurotic young American woman poet, studying on a fellowship at Cambridge, meets and marries the ‘black marauder’ who is the male poet-muse of her fantasies. Doubled and twinned – ‘one skin between us’, as she says; ‘two feet of one body’, as he says – they launch on the hard labour of poetic careers, supporting themselves on writing prizes and intermittent teaching jobs ...”

“... plain. The pinball machine of history then sent the consequences flying round the continent, and we are still observing the ricochets. Within fifty years of this apparently trivial action (Luther’s seminar never took place), people were calling the unintended consequences ‘the Reformation’. Modern inhabitants of the United Kingdom will be familiar with ...”

“... it is the recent explosion of personal baseness that middle England has now finally noticed, then we should be thankful that they have noticed anything at all. The grasping mediocrity of this administration’s members is by no means its worst fault but it is the most beneficial to the nation if it is what eventually leads to its timely collapse. The ...”

“... film which is up on the screen turns out to be Budd Boetticher’s Westbound, one of the Randolph Scott cycle, although the voice that we hear on the soundtrack is mysteriously speaking some lines of poetry by Guillaume Apollinaire. In a way, this aberrant moment summed up Godard’s appeal for me – the perverse mixture ...”

“... David Byrne for which it finds space: ‘You may ask yourself/Well, how did I get here?’How did we get here? What can the history of books of quotations tell us about what they’re now expected to contain? As everybody knows, ‘there is no new thing under the sun’ (Ecclesiastes 1:9, often quoted as ‘There’s nothing new under the sun’), and ...”