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“... Sovietology in the 1970s. There were young people like me who had recently come into the academic field and thought they should be able to write about the Soviet Union the way they wrote about everything else – that is, as objectively as they could. And there were people like Robert Conquest, a quarter-century older, formed in different intellectual and ...”

“... an Australian (Geraint Jones), a South African (Kevin Pietersen), even a genuine public schoolboy (Andrew Strauss), all coached by a white Zimbabwean (Duncan Fletcher), many having previously been schooled by an Australian (Rodney Marsh). No wonder the two sides get on so well together. The one moment this summer when genuine antipathy seemed to spring up ...”

“... Marriage, mortality, memory, the onset of middle age and the pressure of children criss-cross Andrew Motion’s latest collection. Should we treat the vivid images and incidents that comprise this volume as fragments to be fused into a unity? We might try to construct a single protagonist: a man entering mid-life, married, a father, aware of his own mortality and that of others, slipping at moments through the doors of memory into his childhood, into his adolescence, into an earlier, failed relationship ...”

“... held for Gilles Deleuze (a ‘Christ among philosophers’). I learned a lot about her from Andrew Wilson’s biography, a book which strikes the right balance between empathy and critical distance. Wilson’s interpretations of her work, however, are often vapid. Can one really take seriously remarks such as: ‘Highsmith’s fiction, like Bacon’s ...”

“... Newman, Rothko, Still – pointing out that what mattered for all of them was the creation of a field ‘which melds figure and ground into a totality’ and confronts the onlooker in such a way that his perceptual efforts become one with the content of the painting. This is as true of Still as it is of de Kooning. It was the underlying enterprise, far more ...”

“... her to a job at the Singer factory. And in six months’ time Margaret and Hugh were married in St Andrew’s Cathedral. A rapid cloud of starlings blew over the seven bridges. Margaret was different. Her family were gentle people. They liked to put pictures around their house, and the flowers of the field on the kitchen ...”

“... poetry anthologies could change the world. ‘If a man were permitted to make all the ballads,’ Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun wrote, ‘he need not care who should make the laws of a nation.’ But nationality still mattered: Seamus Heaney’s reaction to his inclusion in Blake Morrison and Andrew Motion’s 1982 Penguin ...”

“... of screening for cancer. ‘The NHS spends a significant amount of money on health screening,’ Andrew Miller, the chair of the committee, said, ‘and it is important that this is underpinned by good scientific evidence.’ But the awkward truth is that much of the evidence is contested. The argument over breast cancer screening has been going on for ...”

“... it’. The opportunities available in the North Sea since BP’s discovery of the West Sole gas field, and, more particularly, since the oil discoveries off the Scottish coast from the late 1960s onwards, should have been clear enough even to those with only a fraction of the Buxton dash and drive. We are already producing about as much oil as Libya and ...”

“... preachin,’ she said. North Carolina was the birthplace of Billy Graham and three US presidents, Andrew Johnson, James Polk and Andrew Jackson, and also, among the twinkling lights out there, you could find the uncelebrated birthplace of Thomas Wolfe, the North Carolinian who wrote Look Homeward, Angel. As the truck got ...”

“... and Alistair Darling flee London as Parliament quakes against the background of a setting sun. Andrew Rawnsley’s The End of the Party is less dramatic: we see Brown, Mandelson and Blair in a morning-after sprawl; Brown’s big toe sticks out of his sock. The Guardian compilation reminds readers how high expectations were when Brown took over. ‘Master ...”

“... the head of the US National Institute for Mental Health – the primary funder of research in the field – announced that the NIMH was going to abandon the DSM because it dealt only with symptoms. He wanted science; he wanted genetic and neurological research, and believed that, as in any other field of medicine, this ...”

“... work to be done, so, once he’s better, our Signor Tenente goes with others to clear the field hospitals in the mountains and take down the wounded. He visits Gorizia again, where, before long, he is holed up in a villa eating spaghetti and drinking ‘two bottles of wine that had been left in the cellar of the villa’. I wondered at the mention of ...”

“... which is not green but appears, in the half-light, a sinister whitish grey. As he wanders in the field there comes from ‘deep within’ the mysterious intuition of a ‘word he could not catch’, but the missing word is not recalled, and the ‘hubbub in his mind’ subsides into stillness again.The doubling of consciousness, in which the figure straying ...”

“... how, pace King Lear, something could have come of nothing, since a random fluctuation in a quantum field might have popped an inflatable particle into fleeting existence, but rather where the quantum field itself might have come from. Or is to raise such a question merely to confuse different language games, modelling a ...”