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“... your lover) and to be offering his publishers a valuable franchise along the lines of the late Michael Dibdin’s Aurelio Zen. From the start, it would have been a frail scheme to rely on. The book’s prologue, in which a Korean labourer, falsely accused of killing a young woman, is beheaded in front of Minami by a military policeman on the day of ...”

“... rancour in the portrait. ‘As Bellow became famous,’ Kazin admits, ‘his sense of his great powers was affronted by the stupidity of others. It would be my function in life, like that of all critics, to disappoint him.’ There is a little more salt in the portrait of Lionel Trilling: In person, there was immense and even cavernous subtlety to the ...”

“... and so on. These kinds of magical happening are nowadays assumed to be evidence of great creative powers. Bright lights are taken as evidence of habitation. But this is more like hysterical realism than magical realism: it borrows from the real while evading it. These novels are profligate with what might be called inhuman stories: ‘inhuman’ not because ...”

“... trust in the ‘intelligence community’. If they can’t save us, who will? They need all the powers they have been given if they are to achieve what they must. On 29 May, the Times published another front-page Kushner story, this one by Glenn Thrush, Maggie Haberman and Sharon LaFraniere. The attack now began at the beginning – ‘The most successful ...”

“... African Revenue Service. A raft of experienced officers were lost and the agency’s investigative powers curtailed. KPMG, which audited the Guptas for fifteen years, wrote off Vega’s wedding costs as a business expense. PwC, the auditor of South African Airways, concluded that the company was in compliance with regulations, when it was actually being ...”

“... of the 19 are biographical studies and are often outstandingly good: the essay on Douglas Jay and Michael Stewart (‘The Tortoise and the Hare’), for example, is absolutely just and that on David Owen – which I doubt that Owen will like very much – is remarkable. On the whole, I think the theoretical essays are more successful than the historical ...”

“... John Stevas did a disservice by exaggerating their likely role. This enabled traditionalists like Michael Foot and Enoch Powell to warn that expanding the role of the committees might distract attention from the proper Parliamentary forum, the floor of the House. On their view, this would damage the position of individual members and of Parliament ...”

“... The age of true Classicism in painting was over before Victoria’s accession: Ingres, as Michael Greenhalgh has lately pointed out, was no true Classicist. The Grecising pictures of the Leightons and the Alma Tademas employ Greek decor, but are in temper, as in quality, singularly unhellenic. Another domain in which we encounter much Greek decor, but ...”

“... reluctant to leave their respective countries, and only did so to attend conferences of the great powers. But Churchill could hardly wait to get on a boat or a plane for a Cook’s Tour of the battlefields, or meetings with exotic foreign potentates. Three of his four Christmases as prime minister were spent overseas. He made so many flights around the ...”

“... was printed called Lachrymae Musarum, the Tears of the Muses for this most hopeful young nobleman. Michael Gearin-Tosh, in Essays and Studies, has cogently argued that this was an opportunity for poets of royalist sympathies covertly to mourn Charles I’s execution. Marvell contributed a beautiful and haunting little poem, but young Dryden’s effort is in ...”

“... rest of us sat in the kitchen biting our nails and covering our ears as my father, upstairs, gave Michael the beating of his life for that. Another time, the whole family had to sit in front of a children’s panel. That’s what happens in Scotland if a child under 16 commits an offence: the social work department calls in the whole family in an effort to ...”

“... the lives of tens of thousands of civilians.Among earlier fiction to come out of the civil war, Michael Ondaatje’s novel Anil’s Ghost (2000) is set during the early phases and the linked stories in Romesh Gunesekera’s Noontide Toll (2014) in its aftermath. There’s also Samanth Subramanian’s compelling non-fiction account, based on interviews with ...”

“... at that, now,’ her mother, a perfume magnate whose Protestant husband died nastily for Michael Collins, says of a cup of tea: ‘Strong enough to trot a mouse on.’ He amuses himself, also, by playing up the hero’s drink problem – Marlowe has to be helped into a taxi, passes out in his clothes, throws up – and having him grouse about his ...”

“... was late to take an interest. There are no druids in Shakespeare, not even in Cymbeline. Michael Drayton repeatedly mentions them, but uses both the ‘horrid sacrificer’ and ‘wise philosopher’ images impartially. Milton seems to have first welcomed them as sagacious fellow poets, but then either caught up with Tacitus or had his anti-papal ...”

“... efforts to tackle climate change over the course of the first decade of the 21st century. Michael Beard is a Nobel Prize-winning physicist in his fifties. But it’s been thirty years since Richard Feynman hailed Beard’s research as ‘magic’ at the 1972 Solvay Conference, and the Beard-Einstein Conflation – the details of which are for obvious ...”