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“... the tiredest of tropes by damning the BBC’s coverage as the work of ‘traitors in our midst’. Norman Tebbit’s much quoted tirade against the corporation – the ‘insufferable, smug, sanctimonious, naive, guilt-ridden, wet, pink orthodoxy of that sunset home of third-rate minds of that third-rate decade, the Sixties’ – betrayed a shaky grasp of ...”

“... of American Bases. Before I agreed (and in an effort to get out of going, I suspect) I consulted Norman Dombey who (as readers of the LRB know) is well versed in nuclear politics. Not that Menwith Hill – RAF Menwith Hill, as it is euphemistically called, though it’s almost wholly American – is (yet) a nuclear base, only a satellite warning and ...”

“... Cheney conceded, ‘but the most plentiful source of affordable energy in the country.’ Philip Clapp, president of the US National Environmental Trust, denounced Cheney’s plan as ‘an across-the-board attack on the environment’. Europeans began calling Bush the ‘Toxic Texan’. Scientists have all but unanimously condemned the new US ...”

“... not to this ethnic-political entity, the ‘New English’, but to the ‘Old English’, of Anglo-Norman descent like the family names of Burke, Nagle and Nugent, and historically Catholic. His family were converts to the Church of Ireland, much like the conversos or ‘New Christians’ of 16th-century Spain, who maintained in private the religion they were ...”

“... threats and intellectual gestures, seems far away, but almost as distant is the world of Philip Larkin, with all its equally carefully set-up shabbinesses, contrivances and confidences which only ten years ago seemed an exact and honest image of the way people actually lived. To the poetry of every age its dream and image of itself, but there seems ...”

“... closer to the outlines of Theroux’s history. Neither book is imaginable without the precedent of Philip Roth’s Zuckerman Unbound (1981) – in which Zuckerman’s succès de scandale Carnovsky stands in for Portnoy’s Complaint – and The Counterlife (1986). Theroux followed Roth into a hall of mirrors from which it is hard to find the exit. Roth’s ...”

“... Sabbath ‘anti-heretical stereotypes’ unleashed from above were ‘only a secondary element’. Norman Cohn is taken to task for exaggerating their importance. The claim is unpersuasive. Cohn’s demonstration of the constancy of the stereotype of the secret sect – practising promiscuity, blasphemy, anthropophagy – from pagan accusations against the ...”

“... older sister Rita. Rita Lydig – her second husband was a wealthy New York businessman, Philip Lydig – was like one of Edith Wharton’s spoiled anti-heroines: sexy, insane, theatrical, improvident and entrancingly beautiful. She appears – a wanton in Worth gowns – in countless memoirs of Old New York. Men held her in near-cultic ...”

“... of the wilderness years was shared by Mitchell’s colleagues. ‘Why didn’t he write more?’ Philip Hamburger, one of Mitchell’s friends at the New Yorker, asked. ‘Well, he wrote enough.’ The great bulk of Mitchell’s work can be found in the 718-page omnibus volume, Up in the Old Hotel, published by Pantheon four years before Mitchell’s ...”

“... Third Policeman. How far Father Tebbit actually travelled in his quest for employment is unclear. Norman was born in Ponders End and elected to Parliament as the member for Chingford, a distance of about three miles. Ponders End is more of a transport collision than a settlement and nobody needs much political arm-twisting to move on. Probably the best ...”

“... of influential mavericks – from Nabokov and Henry Miller to William Burroughs, James Baldwin, Philip Roth and the Beats – had been chipping away at the old taboos. But it still took courage to challenge the stultifying pieties of middlebrow culture. Being a woman didn’t help. (Does it ever?) Over the course of an admittedly strange and somewhat ...”

“... and dangerous became more and more part of her legend. ‘Giving a camera to Diane,’ Norman Mailer said, ‘is like putting a live grenade in the hands of a child.’ In 1962, she began to use a Rolleiflex instead of a Nikon. The advantage wasn’t merely that the Rollei could register more detail but that it could be held at waist level. ‘The ...”

“... I was God.’ Once a god, always a god? And yet always a reviser. On other days he can sound like Philip Larkin. Were there two Lowells, or only one? Lowell employed the term ‘dual personality’, a term which belongs to literature, and which also belongs to 19th-century medicine. The meaning of the term has remained uncertain: but it is certain that ...”

“... Oddingley Grange on Trench Lane, whose châtelaine was a Mrs White, aunt of Lieutenant-Colonel Philip Robinson, commanding officer of the Royal Artillery 67th Field Regiment, Territorial Army. Lt Col Robinson approved, and a gruff handshake transformed my father into a second lieutenant, though he had to serve his time as a failed schoolteacher until June ...”

“... that he omitted to clarify this fixed principle to the intellectuals of Camelot. When asked by Philip Toynbee and others to take a position on nuclear disarmament, as Ignatieff describes it,Berlin replied – with rather uncharacteristic bravado – that liberal principles were of little meaning unless one was prepared to risk one’s very survival in ...”