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“... the future Edward VII, who was not mouldable. He tried hard but had, as his mother put it, a ‘small empty brain’ and persistent discouragement and criticism made him unhappy and rebellious. He was growing up to be a worry and a disappointment. Towards the end of the 1850s Albert seems to have lost heart and begun to give up the unequal struggle that had ...”

“... And of those national societies, none was more important than the British League of Nations Union. Helen McCarthy’s book is the first full study of the LNU to be published in more than thirty years. It is an important work of recovery. Almost forgotten today, the LNU was one of the largest and most vibrant voluntary associations of the interwar years. With ...”

“... holds to his priorities is well illustrated in Riders, the first book he appears in. His fiancée, Helen, spends all her savings on an Augustus John drawing of a horse for his wedding present. She gives him it, goes to answer the doorbell, and when she comes back fifteen minutes later finds him looking at the drawing with satisfaction. ‘That’s ...”

“... is wearing no make-up. Her pink mouth has a full underlip and you can see the glint of small white teeth. Her brown eyes are wide open. She is looking towards the light source and her pupils are so precisely defined that they reflect the window divided by the horizontal bar of the window frame she is looking at. The mirror of her eyes reminds me of ...”

“... in his sumptuously lit study. I liked that he threw books on the floor. No one came to the small gallery in the hour I stayed there. It was late October. The days were foggy. By lunchtime, a pale sun fought to break through, and, for about an hour before it did, an unearthly and sickly yellow light clung to everything. And then there was sunshine. One ...”

“... literate of serfs did not have civil rights. ‘People could be bought and sold wholesale or in small numbers, by families or singly like bulls and sheep,’ Nikitenko writes. He is being circumspect. Though he doesn’t excuse the system, and even talks of its ‘corruptive effects’, there is much that he doesn’t say. For the majority of serfs, after ...”

“... salone: the frowning Stoic, the scowling Cynic, the po-faced female allegory. He relies on a very small repertory of hand movements, just as his pigment-shopping never ventures beyond the cheap materials expended on the Empedocles canvas. There are the skittering light-streaks that activate valleys and skies in his narrative landscapes: the lush, fat cupping ...”

“... Book of English Verse, published a hundred years ago, revised in 1939, and followed in 1972 by Helen Gardner’s New Oxford Book; of the Longman Anthology of British Literature, a brashly devolutionary challenger to the Norton Anthology of English Literature’s supremacy in the American textbook market; and, in the last month of the last century, of the ...”

“... seems to try to render in exact terms. Most contemporary American poetry wants only to offer what Helen Vendler has called ‘an interior state clarified in language’. ‘Clarified’ is an ambiguous word here, meaning the poetry’s effort to achieve the effect of being clear on the page. In Ashbery’s case the wordage trembles with a perpetual delicacy ...”

“... commonplace and the customary. In Carn, Patrick McCabe describes three decades in the life of a small Irish community. Carn is a small town situated half a mile from the Irish border, a town honoured in Republican annals for the heroism of Commandant Matt Dolan, shot dead in 1922 during a raid on the railway. Dolan has ...”

“... generous proportion of the proceeds to help good causes in the arts; perhaps even make a small but entirely uncalled-for donation to Tony Churt himself. At the moment of this fantasy, Martin doesn’t even know whether the painting is a Bruegel or not, hasn’t shared his guess with Kate, his recently married but long-suffering wife, and is ...”

“... health challenge of asymptomatic Covid-19 transmission. The need for testing was such that our small team was soon on Zoom calls with Silicon Valley startups, the California Covid-19 Testing Task Force, Admiral Brett Giroir (the US testing tsar) and the White House task force (two guys sharing a bedsit in San Francisco). We suggested to executives at Apple ...”

“... and moved to the slums. New converts to a ‘simple life’, they tinted the walls of their small house, waxed the uncarpeted floors and improvised furniture, hoping to set an aesthetic example to their neighbours. The drawing-room gatherings and expensive clothes of their former lives now seemed ‘as dross’. On a January morning the following year ...”

“... Bella, who is 17, has recently moved from sunny Arizona to live with her single father in Forks, a small town on the Olympic Peninsula, well known, apparently, for its rain and dullness: it’s ‘literally my personal hell on earth’. There, she falls in love with Edward Cullen, one of a small sect who call themselves ...”

“... it is obvious she was very fond of him and regretted the breakdown of her marriage. Her narrator, Helen, says: ‘I dream about Ned, as I am to dream about him for years and years to come. In these dreams he is always angry and I am always sad.’ That summer of 1990, as we drove about East Hampton and Amagansett on our way to swim or shop, Janet would ...”