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“... surgery retreads looking for vengeance, decent Hispanic cops, intelligent strippers with hearts of gold: a generically complacent agenda. But good fun to read from a few thousand miles away. You don’t have to worry, at that distance, about suspending disbelief. You’re happy to swallow an ex-state governor called Skink Tyree, a Vietnam vet liberal, who ...”

“... It was Florida, and in particular the resort of Long Key, to which he was first invited by Judge Arthur Powell in January 1922, that established for Stevens the geographical polarities that came to serve as his dominant metaphor for irreconcilable opposites. ‘We must come together as soon as we can and every winter afterwards,’ he wrote back to Elsie ...”

“... literary idea going back at least to Spenser) appears, according to Hughes, in such paintings as Arthur Hughes’s ambiguous April Love and The Long Engagement. The angelic-looking women in these two paintings might be monsters, she seems to suggest, because we can feel the throb of their deep blue and violet attire and see the sharp contrast between the ...”

“... his sense of life as erotic confusion and his consciousness of the horrors of modern warfare. Like Arthur Miller’s later Death of a Salesman, Death of a Hero has a protagonist who is an engaging and far from conventional hero. The first half of the novel draws on George Winterbourne’s conflicted feelings for two women – surely (though the author denied ...”

“... fragrances known to me, it gives the irresistible impression of a smooth, continuously curved, gold-coloured volume that stretches deliciously, like a sleepy panther, from top note to drydown. Yes, it contains rose, jasmine and aldehydes in the same way that a perfect body contains legs and arms. But I defy all who smell this to keep enough wits about them ...”

“... I like the little twist about Margherita’s favourite pair of gloves, ‘double kid bordered with gold thread’, and how she probably gave up wearing them after 1388, when a new Florentine law decreed that prostitutes had to wear gloves. Another favourite topic is health, about which Francesco fretted continuously. Prescriptions are offered by friends as ...”

“... 295 of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, A.J.P. Kenny critically examined Arthur Danto’s notion (approved by Chomsky) that there might in principle be such a thing as a ‘Spanish Pill’ which (given the structure of the human brain) would have the property of endowing those who swallowed it with a mastery of Spanish. A knowledge of ...”

“... are not as easily laughed off. Anyone who has read Eating people is wrong and who knew the late Arthur Humphries (professor of English at Leicester, where Bradbury got his first degree) must suspect that the novel’s hero, Stuart Treece, is a portrait from life. Nor could one believe that the portrait (although it is not at all malicious) furnished its ...”

“... by his compatriots. Thirteen ships departed in 1698 and only three returned, ‘laden not with gold, but sick men and women’, undermining Scotland’s already weak economy to the point where union with England was a matter of desperate financial need. Clamour for union had grown throughout the 17th century, with Scotland and England’s shared Protestant ...”

“... backstage at the Haymarket, ‘ready dressed in a handsome silk stocking, with a polished shoe and gold buckle’. It was jokingly referred to as ‘the most wooden member of the company’. Foote gave 56 performances that summer, a punishing schedule even in normal circumstances. Pain, stress and exhaustion were the unwritten story, which can be read, or at ...”

“... lowered, led The child I was to a shut door. Inside, Blinds beat sun from the bed. The green-gold room throbbed like a bruise. Under a sheet, clad in taboos Lay whom we sought, her hair undone, outspread, And of a blackness found, if ever now, in old Engravings where the acid bit. I must have needed to touch it Or the whiteness – was she dead? Her ...”

“... flow of books, films and other media. When Dreyer made his extraordinary film in 1928, and Arthur Honegger and Paul Claudel composed the oratorio Jeanne d’Arc au bûcher ten years later, both were working in the light of modern wars and prejudice. And their works are prophetic: the civil war in 15th-century France presages the treacheries both of the ...”

“... made it part of the poem’. It is the great pleasure of encountering ancient Chinese poetry in Arthur Waley’s versions that ‘their glimpses of ordinary life communicate instantly across the centuries’; but then reading any great literature, as Carey says in the encomium with which he closes his autobiography, ‘makes you see that ordinary things are ...”

“... closed off by her security men. I see a couple of proprietorial Russians trying to ferry Arthur Miller to the graveside. Squeezing past, he steps apologetically on our toes in one direction and then again in the other direction – but gets no nearer the epicentre represented by Yevtushenko and the television cameras. Yevtushenko introduces each ...”

“... is itself already quite modern.) Before Keith Richards, before punk, here is rock and roll animal Arthur Rimbaud with his anti-gravity shock of lightning strike hair. A queer Pan with italicised attitude, Rimbaud gets the Leonardo DiCaprio film and David Wojnarowicz mask. All Baudelaire’s best-known head shots are from his twilight ...”