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“... with a stairway to heaven. The steps, coincidentally, chime in with a poem by the recently dead Ian Hamilton printed in the LRB. We are on a kind of stair. The world below Will never be regained; was never there Perhaps. And yet it seems We’ve climbed to where we are With diligence, as if told long ago How high the highest rung. 23 January. To ...”

“... leading native historian, B.B. Misra, has written; ‘Indian troops … conquered the country for Britain.’ There is a touch of exaggeration, and anachronism, in the judgment. But it delivers a basic truth. Foreign conquerors were no novelty in the subcontinent, whose northern plains had known successive waves of invaders from the tenth century onwards. For ...”

“... to fill in the spaces. The tone of it reminds me of the tone of Lowell’s conversation with Ian Hamilton from 1971, mechanically clever but distant and deaf, all denatured one-liners and musing rhetorical questions. It’s not conversation but the complacent burble of a radio on a windowsill. History is about as broad as Lowell gets, a custard-pie ...”

“... of legitimacy that mass democratic politics can bestow on successful politicians, particularly in Britain and the United States. Gladstone was, for Weber, ‘the dictator of the electoral battlefield’, and Weber admired the British Parliamentary system precisely for its capacity to produce leaders of this type. Gladstone may have been an ethical ...”

“... find the British approach equally horrifying). America has some natural predators that Britain has not (though both have plenty of cars), but the differences here are chiefly cultural. Nussbaum accepts the received wisdom and practices of her own country and culture, and her attempts to square this with the CA are not convincing. She isn’t wrong ...”

“... utopian and the innovative artist. Whereas the first kind of philosopher (a kind common in Britain and America, and exemplified by even such relatively liberated analytic philosophers as Thomas Nagel and Bernard Williams) contrasts ‘hard scientific fact’ with ‘the subjective’ or with ‘metaphor’, the second kind – common elsewhere in the ...”

“... dull that it nauseated me’. But the imaginative arts lined up to pay tribute. In Cambridge, Ian McEwan and A.S. Byatt spoke about their ‘literary relationship with Darwin’. The joint Yale-Cambridge museum homage, Endless Forms: Charles Darwin, Natural Science and the Visual Arts (at the Fitzwilliam in Cambridge and the Yale Center for British ...”

“... there were a couple of titles by Ngaio Marsh, a batch of paperbacks by Dennis Wheatley and Ian Fleming and an incomplete, untouched set of Dickens in pale blue cloth bindings. Nobody went near the Dickens – Colin, a reader of contemporary paperbacks only, declared a hatred of him for his infatuation with the poor and his longwindedness. Maureen ...”

“... fans were crushed to death, people were already wondering what the disaster at Grenfell said about Britain and the way we live. ‘We have to look this in the eye,’ one of the police officers later said to me. The fire hadn’t even reached its dreadful zenith before the TV announcers began shaking their heads and looking for austerity commentators and ...”

“... integral nationalism of the interwar period was given a new impetus when Menderes – solicited by Britain – took up the cause of the Turkish minority in Cyprus, reclaiming rights of intervention in the island relinquished at Lausanne. In 1955, as a Three-Power Conference on its future was meeting in London, his regime unleashed a pogrom against the Greek ...”