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“... manifested during Monicagate. Hitchens ridicules the claim made by Toni Morrison and endorsed by Arthur Miller that because Clinton came from a broken home and had an alcoholic mother, he suffered from the same prejudices as those directed at blacks, and thus in some sense is ‘our first black President’. He knows that when Clinton, as Governor of ...”

“... Henry Woodd Nevinson is one of my heroes, the sort of person I dream of being. The champion crusader of Edwardian journalism, he filed pro-Revolutionary articles from Russia in 1905, and pro-Nationalist pieces from India. He won an exhausting battle to expose forced labour on the cocoa plantations of Portuguese Angola. Celebrated as a war correspondent, he started off wanting to fight, and picked up his pen only when he couldn’t persuade his Radical friends to join him in setting up a legion of volunteers to help Greece in its war against Turkey ...”

“... with after-death experience? (I’m thinking of things like Mrs Oliphant’s A Beleaguered City, Arthur Machen’s tales, Aldous Huxley’s Time must have a stop, and a host of horror and SF.) But the main objection to Death Sentences is its self-consciously high-powered theoretical argument. The book was evidently written in the exuberance of the author’s ...”

“... of tiresome people from the Daily Express. (Wodehouse’s relationship with the Waughs – Alec, Arthur and Evelyn – must be somebody’s thesis.) ‘Over Seventy’ was first published in 1957 when Wodehouse was 76. It is not as funny as the first book in the trilogy, ‘Bring on the girls’ (1954). This is a fanciful memoir about his life as a Broadway ...”

“... that paid off handsomely, though Greene ended up with little profit when he was squeezed out by Arthur Miller. It was a time of crisis for Marilyn, when her marriage to Joe DiMaggio was breaking up and her affair with Miller beginning. In 1956 she converted to Judaism, married Miller, and went to England to make a film she financed herself: The Prince and ...”

“... K was mine (K.P. not C.P.).’ MacKenzie carefully surveys the political development of the young Pearson (‘the poverty and squalor of Victorian England, and the complacent superficiality of Cambridge University, are themes that begin to appear in his thought’), and there is ample evidence that by the time he became seriously involved in the ...”

“... he offers up is fanciful, contrived. Like Marshall Walker’s dutiful assemblage of notecards (‘Arthur Miller studies the relation between society and the individual in terms of three clearly identifiable themes’), it assumes an orderly progression of influence, of decades and periods, of regional writers and schools and themes, of a ‘usable ...”

“... page the book’s centrepiece in fact includes a fourth essay, ‘George Eliot: She Was Still Young’. But this was given alone in both a broadcast and a journal version, in 1980, while the others (prefaced by ‘Literature and the Matter of Fact’) were linked as a series for the Clark Lectures at Cambridge in 1991. The three together make a discrete ...”

“... given in the opening chapter of the origins of Islam tells an exceedingly old-fashioned tale of young Muhammad the mystic giving way to an older Muhammad the social legislator – it made me think of Carlyle’s account in On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History. Where the non-specialist reader is concerned, one of the most confusing aspects is ...”

“... own lips and passing it to Bette Davis (Now, Voyager). With approval, he cites the mass meeting of young women at Teheran University; every pouting lip framing a cigarette in protest at a Khomeini fatwah against smoking for females. In spite of the misogyny of certain styles of smoking (pipes, of course, and Rudyard Kipling’s hearty attitude towards cigars ...”

“... my pocket money went on books – Billy Bunter, Jennings, William, War Picture Library, Biggles, Arthur Ransome, bird books. In the 1950s I used to order Puffin books by post from the catalogue, the pleasure of unwrapping the parcel rivalling the discovery of a new book in a Christmas stocking. For my ninth or tenth birthday I asked for a glass-fronted ...”

“... Walter Hopps opened the Ferus Gallery on La Cienega Boulevard, with a line-up of largely unknown young male artists they called ‘the studs’. As Chicago later put it, ‘no women artists were taken seriously. The men sat around Barney’s and talked about cars, motorcycles and their joints. I knew nothing about cars, less about motorcycles, and certainly ...”

“... arms and armour, he stood in the chilly drizzle over what was said to be the grave of King Arthur and chanted an extended, improvised rabbinical-druidic hymn. It evoked the strength and innocence of Blake’s Albion and ended on what seemed to me, at the time, a strange remark, perhaps a challenge hurled from king to king: ‘British poets are ...”

“... intervention. He made a mortal enemy of the rival claimant, Menelik, the ambitious and clever young ruler of the southern kingdom of Shoa. Menelik’s power was significantly enhanced by his marriage in 1883 to Taytu Betul, which gave him the support of her influential kinsmen in the north. The acquisition in 1887 of the city of Harar, situated 300 miles ...”

“... planning utopias have never been popular except with political elites. Peter Willmott and Michael Young, in Family and Kinship in East London (1957), painted a dire picture of community warmth in the old East End giving way to anomie and alienation in the new towns to which bombed-out families were forced to move. In the end, the destruction of European ...”