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“... is evidence that all print media are corrupted, and that reading is a dying skill, don’t worry. Michael Crozier’s ‘how we did it’ account of the birth of the Independent, an account which resembles a parish-magazine post-mortem on the last jumble sale, patting many backs and giving hardly a hint of tantrums, proves that grey-flannel design is alive ...”

“... The Authenticity of ‘Prometheus Bound’ (1977). In a recent edition of the play in translation, Michael Ewans argues that ‘in dramatic style and technique, as well as language and poetic style, Prometheus is markedly different from, and inferior to, the six other dramas’ in the Aeschylean canon. Ewans dates the play to c.440-430BC, twenty years after ...”

“... within the rich cultures and subcultures of agitation in and out of doors. In the light of this, Michael Duffy, as general editor of this series, has rightly decided that a substantial explanatory introduction was needed for each volume and he has assembled a first-rate team of historians to address such problems. Several have interpreted their brief as ...”

“... writing to the place which in some atavistic way they believe to be the source of their literary powers.’ That might seem a surprising thing for Moore to have said, since he appears to have discovered the keys to his prison quite early in life. He was born a Catholic in Belfast in 1921, emigrated to Canada in 1948 and ended his days (though he doesn’t ...”

“... To return to all that. Alas, this spirited gesture merely revealed the impotence of age, the powers irrevocably lost to the killer progeny. The son’s book was a runaway success, the father’s remaindered. Not many famous writers can be read in terms of their immediate ancestry: Graves is an exception. Powerful wires were in some way crossed or the ...”

“... will probably do the same, but its deeds are unlikely to match its words. As a backbencher, Michael Heseltine was groping for a German-style developmental corporatism. Ministers like Chris Patten and Malcolm Rifkind were visibly at odds with New Right doctrine even before the change of government. John Major himself is, of course, an unknown ...”

“... be dependent on its resources for the foreseeable future: ‘America wants to discourage those powers from developing the means to protect that resource for themselves.’ Much of US power is built on the back of the most profitable protection racket in modern history. The developed Asian economies are heavily reliant on Persian Gulf oil and Qatari natural ...”

“... far as any serious writer in America from neo-modernist or avant-garde programmes. Hollander’s Powers of Thirteen (1983) consists of 169 sonnet-like units with 13 lines of 13 syllables each, and titles (or ‘titles’) printed below each one. The first unit concludes: ‘I do what I am told, and tell what is done to me,/Making but one promise safely ...”

“... threatening to turn even Gandhi into an also-ran. Meanwhile, he makes a cameo appearance in Michael Dobbs’s new Good-fellowe thriller, which revolves around the hunt for his next incarnation in London. The Chinese villains are as dastardly as one might wish from HarperCollins, as sinister as the Manchu embassy officials who in 1896 kidnapped the ...”

“... to have been participants or contemporary observers, or at least infants, in 1956. Except for Michael Korda’s lively memory of an Oxford undergraduate jaunt, they are historically serious and not only recollect but analyse emotion in tranquillity. Victor Sebestyen’s Twelve Days is well documented, based on up to date knowledge, and vividly ...”

“... was only one way to make it work – by getting the people who knew him talking. Andrew O’Hagan Michael Wood (film critic): Those working-class lads seemed to be everywhere in British films of the 1960s, grunting and sweating their way through the class system, using sex as a narrow and repressed form of guerrilla warfare. We are often told about the new ...”

“... road, or the end of a certain road, are obviously heartfelt, and therefore a kind of renouncing of powers in the act of displaying them. Vonnegut called Breakfast of Champions, in the Preface, ‘my 50th birthday present to myself’; he felt ‘as though I am crossing the spine of a roof – having ascended one slope’. He has elsewhere said that the book ...”

“... It was American scientists who went ballistic over Velikovsky, not historians, and one purpose of Michael Gordin’s probing and intelligent The Pseudoscience Wars is to ask why they responded to Velikovsky as they did. Putting that sort of question is a sign of changed times. Passions have cooled; circumstances have altered. Almost all previous books about ...”

“... The ‘raft of laws’ of which he now disapproves seems to have emanated exclusively from Michael Howard, when the Government was already on its last legs. Alexander’s book is a compelling account of what the powerful in our society now mean by democracy; his is the authentic voice of post-democratic liberalism and his version of democracy both ...”

“... of ‘the narrow gauge of the wheels’. We are regularly and justly impressed by Holmes’s powers of observation and inference. But there is no contest between ourselves and the detective, just as there seems to be none recorded between Holmes’s prototype, Dr Joseph Bell, and his pupils in Edinburgh – or, indeed, between that ...”