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He inhaled deeply and howled, a piteous piercing wail of abandonment and despair. For speechless helpless humans, much power lay in a violent switch of extreme emotions.
Dogberry.
It was alive in most classrooms, where discipline was not imposed but assumed by ex-servicemen who themselves had once received orders in a grand cause. Obedience was a given. Everyone could relax.
‘Nothing is so dishonourable in a civilised nation as to permit itself to be “governed” without resistance by a reckless clique
he was an insignificant organism on a giant rock rolling eastwards at a thousand miles an hour as it hurtled through the emptiness among the remote indifferent stars.
argumentative unpredictable punitive members of a lofty elite.
Now the idea of a sexual encounter rose before them like a mountain range, beautiful, dangerous, irresistible. But still far away.
Not posh and neither impressed by nor contemptuous of those who were.
parody, mockery were their modes, ludicrous renderings of authority’s voice and stock phrases.
allegory,
‘Quelle connerie!’
But how did the atrocities of Vietnam make Soviet Communism more loveable? he kept asking. The answer was clear. In the bipolar Cold War, communism was the lesser of two evils. To attack it was to sustain the grisly project of capitalism and US imperialism. To ‘bang on’ about abuses in Budapest and Warsaw, to remember the Moscow show trials or the imposed Ukrainian famine was to ‘align’ himself with political undesirables, with the CIA and, ultimately, with fascism.
BBC documentary came on, determined to demonstrate how the GDR had overtaken Britain in quality of life. There was no mention of 200,000 political prisoners – Amnesty’s estimate.
Dylan called up the old songs, joyous, bitter, some with a nasal tone of wounded sarcasm.
he was a genius and a saint who understood, ahead of his colleagues, that the entire communist experiment, its violently imposed empire, its instinct for murder and implausible lies, had been a grotesque failure and had to be ended.
sour, ungenerous, suspicious of anyone’s success.”
Mrs Thatcher, fresh from her big speech to the UN on climate change, was circumspect.
The waiters were real waiters, bred from birth, not aspiring actors and graduate students.
He was in an unreal and sentimental state.
There was nothing so surprising or horrific about a corpse after all. Merely a banal absence.
The John Major government had become tired, divided, soured by trivial scandal. Blair and his ministers were young, they had a thousand new ideas, their confidence was boundless.
a chorus of entangled conversations, loud and contentious, a tumult of analysis, fearful predictions, celebration and angry lament.
punishing fellow Muslims who change or lose their religion? Total crap, one of the worst thought-systems ever devised.
The crappy relativism that’s sweeping through the left.
Schrödinger’s cat.
Failing to win her when he was young was the greatest failure of his life. Perhaps it was not too late.
ectopic
The prime minister was inflamed by traditional loyalty to the US and successful interventions in Sierra Leone and Kosovo.
Henry Green, Antonia White, Barbara Pym, Ford Madox Ford, Ivy Compton-Burnett, Patrick Hamilton.
You don’t have to be mad to work here but it help’s. Roland’s gaze was fixed on the apostrophe,
Whenever Roland met religious figures he felt obliged to protect them from his disbelief, which was so complete that even atheism bored him.
Rosalind’s birth, 1915. He said it was hard to think of another historical period when a single lifetime of ninety years could have encompassed as much change as hers did. When she was born, the Russian Revolution was two years away, the First World War was only just beginning its terrible slaughter. The inventions that would transform the twentieth century – the wireless, the car, the telephone, the aeroplane – had not yet touched the lives of the villagers of Ash. Television, computers, the Internet were years away and unimaginable. So too was the Second War, with its even greater slaughter.
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This was how to steer a life successfully, Roland thought. Make a choice, act! That’s the lesson. A shame not to have known the trick long ago.
‘Ballad of the Easy Life’.
‘Wir wollten einfach nur Spass haben!’
The old Warsaw Pact countries had suffered years of Russian occupation, violently enforced. They had good cause and every right to make their own choices.
On the positive side? Brought down the fascist dictatorship in Argentina, rescued the ozone layer and briefly, before she turned her back on the subject, spoke to the world about climate change. Also, opened shops on Sunday, reformed the Labour Party, lowered inflation and taxes, helped Reagan face down the Soviet Empire, busted some corrupt unions, granted homeownership to the many, showed women how to cow overbearing men in their pomp and entitlement.
categorical imperative?
four laws of thermodynamics.
She thought it amusing and paradoxical that her father could ever have been four years old.
There was more and they came as if tightly rolled or hammered and compressed by engines of time into a single object.
Silence, solitude, pointlessness, perpetual dusk. The names of the days of the week meant nothing.
pandemic lexicon, ‘R’, the fomites, viral loads, the furin cleavage site, heterologous prime-boost trials, vaccine escape variants, case rate/hospitalisation uncoupling and, most resonant and sinister of all, original antigenic sin.
