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“... no problems in the market; they’re French, not Third World produce. In Dominica, Dame Eugenia Charles, Prime Minister since 1980, and magnificent champion of her island’s interests, is not giving in to the pressure of international free trade. She has said that if her people can’t make a living from bananas they will not starve: they will turn to ...”

“... by a distinguished group of historians, including Caroline Robbins, Bernard Bailyn, Gordon Wood and J.G.A. Pocock, offered a compelling account of the reasons British Americans broke with monarchy and then embarked on such a distinctive constitutional experiment, hedged with an idiosyncratic Bill of Rights. For example, the curiously tangled syntax of ...”

“... instead of my feet. My brothers hadn’t the same advantage.’ He hated disorder. His father, Charles Lutyens, was a horse painter of decreasing reputation (Lutyens had no pictures in his house when he first married so as not to have to hang any of his father’s) who became eccentric (dunking roast potatoes in tea) and parsimonious (using newspapers as ...”

“... Knives’, when Macmillan was panicked by a typical Rab Butler indiscretion into sacking the dead wood in his Cabinet, Deedes was brought in to oversee the Government’s public relations. Spin-doctors were unheard of at that time, and Deedes’s task was to exploit his Fleet Street contacts to the Government’s advantage. There were, after all, only two ...”

“... Vasari) further contributed to the myth that Piero had been unable to realise his masterpiece.When Charles Eastlake bought the painting for the National Gallery in 1874, Thomson Hankey, the MP for Peterborough, challenged the Treasury to defend its acquisition of ‘a wreck … ruined beyond redemption’. He had a point: the panel was split, there were candle ...”

“... I just know up from down. I just know there and back, what’s before me and what’s behind. St Charles Borromeo, behind me, is called ‘our church’. The school of St Charles Borromeo is called ‘our school’. Up ahead is Bankbottom, that is called ‘home’: I am slow with the word ‘home’, because no one says ...”

“... most modern. As striking as the tennis shoes, in this respect, is the ‘little bottle of Coty’s Wood-violet perfume, half-empty’, which Connie leaves among Mellors’s things after her second night at the cottage, where it is subsequently discovered by his malevolent wife. ‘She wanted him to remember her in the perfume.’ Spraying perfume on your ...”

“... He returned to Beijing in 1974, and worked in a factory. He wrote furiously, even – like Charles Olson – on the walls of his room. He hated the city, ‘those small light-filled boxes, the crucibles in which age-old humanity is melted down.’ He thought of himself as an insect, ‘pinned to a board with its legs dancing’. But he fell in with a ...”

“... she performed at Carnegie Hall and spoke from the platform during the March on Washington. (Ean Wood wonders if Langston Hughes, who knew Baker in Paris in the 1920s, had her in mind when he included the verse ‘Look at that gal shake that thing./We can’t all be Martin Luther King’ in the second edition of his anthology, The Poetry of the Negro; the ...”

“... a biographer, already manifest in his detailed and persuasive studies of Tennyson, FitzGerald and Charles Kingsley, are at their best in that rich Victorian ambience where religion, art and sex mingled in an unself-conscious totality. He several times takes for granted in criticism or exposition that Hopkins is one of the ‘great’ Victorian poets, but ...”

“... Variation 1: Schoenberg and the Serial Quartet’) we are brought to the near-present of the slap-wood school of composition; of Elliott Carter’s Third Quartet, which summons electronic aids not for the instruments but for the actual ears of the players; and of Shostakovich’s Fifteenth, which could fairly be nicknamed ‘the apotheosis of the ...”

“... all, there is the sympathetic identification, what Hugh Kenner, speaking of Joyce, calls the Uncle Charles Principle: Naipaul’s description so assumes Biswas’s way of thinking that it comically, pedantically offers the precise brand-name of the stomach powder, just as Biswas would if he were narrating the story. Here Naipaul has become Biswas, as we ...”

“... this, forgetting to mention that Rome was in fact taken by mercenaries of the Catholic Emperor Charles V. More was astonishingly disingenuous. Throughout the late 1520s, he claimed that anti-clericalism was identical with heresy, when he, an early anti-clerical, knew this to be untrue. In reply to one Simon Fish, who had argued that England’s travails ...”

“... are his selected diaries, Joseph Cornell’s Theatre of the Mind, edited by Mary Ann Caws, and Charles Simic’s prose poems, an inspired labour of love called Dime Store Alchemy.Cornell’s life as an artist began the day he showed his Ernst-inspired collages to Julien Levy, whose gallery brought Surrealism to America. Levy asked Cornell to design the ...”

“... with fractious children journeyed to see a lump of coal, a steam engine and three hundred kinds of wood. As a schoolboy in 1925 I was taken, willingly enough, to Wembley to the British Empire Exhibition, then in its second triumphal year. I have only the fuzziest recollections of Imperial pavilions and palaces of engineering. Dimly, I recall seeing Canada’s ...”