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“... warning round or two from armed looters in the port. I suspect, however, that the real attraction lay in the fact that so few others knew quite how good the Somalia story was, or indeed quite how bad. The few others became many in December. The curiosity of the American networks in particular was such that a press corps cheeseparingly estimated at three ...”

“... The Felskian postcritic slices through the supposed divide between detached, academic reading and lay reading with pleasure. These caricatures aren’t new, of course, though proponents of postcriticism argue that literary theory has pressured such concepts over the past fifty years.What postcritical reading claims to offer is a solution: tuning back in to ...”

“... with sympathy as well as humour, but also reminds us of the immense intellectual excitement that lay behind what could seem to be mere pedantry. Colocci was doubtless distracted from making progress with his treatise by his perception that it held the key to huge parts of ancient Roman civilisation – cartography, grain supply, census and tax systems, and ...”

“... coming to tell us it was over, I could stand it no longer, and threw myself on the bed, where I lay in stillness, neither hearing nor seeing anything.’ The proximity of their daily lives fostered the sense of shared identity that Wordsworth celebrated in a fragment from 1800: My hope, my joy, my sister and my friend Or something dearer still, if reason ...”

“... stability in the first third of the 18th century. For him, Jacobitism’s primary significance lay in giving Whig politicians a convenient smear: it enabled them to denounce their political rivals, the Tories, as unreliable crypto-Jacobites who could not be trusted with office under the Hanoverians. In so far as Jacobitism had any real existence beyond the ...”

“... in confidence. What I tell him is quite wonderful, quite complicated, and altogether untrue. I lay it on thick, and he believes me.’ When the artist is all but killed by his card-playing companions, the narrator becomes his saviour and caregiver, and perhaps this is the role he unknowingly wanted: friendship as a form of unreturned devotion. Even a king ...”

“... Cezanne, I suspect, tough Aixois businessman, tight paymaster to his disappointing son Paul. Look, papa, no less than you I am a free man, my art is at no one’s service. ‘The word employé seems disgusting to me,’ Cezanne wrote aged 29. The early work – tenebrous fantasias such as The Murder, painted at much the same period in his life ...”

“... from, or contrasted to, Gramsci the political theorist or Gramsci the revolutionary.’ Here lay the primary nexus of ‘hegemony’, in the new domestic colonialism of a weak, belated state anxious to establish its place in the European sun. Lay nationalism and forced anticlericalism were ideological compensations for ...”

“... tank. But the moment that Sarah Palin stepped up to the mike at the Republican Convention in St Paul, and began talking in her homely, mezzo-soprano, Far Western twang, she showed herself to be incontestably the real thing. Americans, starved of völkisch authenticity in their national politicians, thrilled to her presence on the stage. Forty million people ...”

“... Gareth Parry reported in the Guardian of 19 January 1979. Bomb-carriers, from The Secret Agent to Paul Theroux’s Deptford-based urban terrorists in The Family Arsenal, have delighted in targeting Greenwich domes. There is something in the nature of the place, a residue of royalty and privilege and congenital self-satisfaction: the old dockside dowager has ...”

“... one day, he would preach the next. Towards the end of his sentence, the Bedfordshire justices sent Paul Cobb, a clerk of the peace, to obtain Bunyan’s submission. Had Bunyan been willing to sue for pardon and to admit that he had wrongfully convened the meeting at Lower Samsell, he would have been freed, but he refused. Bunyan told Cobb he was willing to ...”

“... photographs were chosen by Goldscheider, who also was responsible for the abridgment and lay-out of the text, which he selected from the first four volumes of Mommsen’s original work. Mommsen’s original fifth volume, conceived as a separate entity anyway, formed the basis of a further Phaidon book in the same format, called Das Weltreich der ...”

“... most extended and schematic exorcism of history and mythology. The poem is – to borrow Paul Zweig’s phrase for ‘Song of Myself’ – a ‘therapeutic epic’. Each of its main characters represents an unfortunate aspect of the West Indian inheritance which, as the poem progresses, is either cured or comfortably accommodated. Philoctete, for ...”

“... bonds of good fellowship in the Westminster-Fleet Street nexus were confirmed by the reception of Paul Routledge’s very unauthorised biography of Peter Mandelson, the Labour Member for Hartlepool who would like to be prime minister. Routledge, an Old Labour hack, set out with an apparently impossible ambition – to do a service to the Labour movement by ...”

“... house for the weekend, simply in order to tease them? But this is what Waugh heroically did to Mr Paul Moor. After Moor had been ushered over the threshold by Waugh’s butler (the date is 1949, when outside the pages of P.G. Wodehouse butlers were a virtually extinct species) he encountered the man he described as his ‘idol’. ‘After an elaborate ...”