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“... to enjoy a country girl called Sasha. It was a huge amount of information for an inexperienced young woman to absorb in a very short time with a crucial deadline pending. ‘I don’t think,’ Sonya wrote years later, ‘I ever recovered from the shock of reading the diaries … I can still remember … the horror of that first appalling experience of ...”

“... her painfrom one continent/to anotherNichols focuses on the tragic effect on slaves when they rob or pay back their owners. ‘Eulogy’ remembers ‘the leaping suicide/ones’ of the Middle Passage. Infanticide leads one slave woman to be punished as a ‘rebel’: staked-out, covered with molasses (what she has been enslaved to make), eaten alive by ...”

“... and fallibility (Lear is Olson’s big parallel) and over-reaching. This was, in a sense, to rob Ahab of his metaphysical glamour and to think, rather, about his effect on the world around him: the new, politicised reading of Moby-Dick was a critical celebration of America’s vigorous adolescence as an economic power and a dark premonition of its ...”

“... by her gender that she has literalised it by erasing herself from her own story. Every time a young woman in a novel sits down and thinks very hard about gender and what she is and is not allowed to do, I think of Zola. Perhaps this is why Nana bored me. ‘Ah,’ I thought, ‘another terrible woman who feels she’s mediocre at her job wanting to devour ...”

“... who, charged by the Lord Chief Justice with having led astray the Prince of Wales, answers: ‘The young Prince hath misled me. I am the Fellow with the great belly, and he my Dogge.’ No one now quite follows this joke, which may be an airy reference (to distract attention) to the Man in the Moon. What is more interesting than Falstaff’s ancient joke is ...”

“... assimilating influences from every conceivable source. She is also a self-consciously brilliant young writer. The Beauties and Furies is evidence of a love-affair with language which produces felicities such as: ‘Not a blade of grass moved and not a bird flew down the perspective of the great water, but, under thickety trees, officers and children skated ...”

“... in 1959 by Lebanese security and his mother has disappeared in Jordan. When Yunis ran across this young boy in the camps, the two developed a father-and-son-like bond. Khaleel went on to join the fedayeen and train as a medic in China, where an old injury disqualified him for the military course he’d been sent to attend. Now he is ‘only half a ...”

“... this poem and Milton’s are about the drowning of a man not especially close to the ambitious young mourner, whose grief is learned and elaborate. The Lowell elegy has almost as much, if a more rebarbative, music. It pursues a meditation on the ocean, and on Captain Ahab’s mad encounter with his whale – a matter in which the poet did not lose interest ...”

“... the scene of Wilson, now famous, returning to Pittsburgh in 2003 for the funeral of his homie Rob Penny, only to have the Penny family bar him from speaking. ‘August … had been silenced because of his own success,’ she writes. But why the annihilating envy? Hartigan tells us that Penny had preceded Wilson at Central Catholic, that he was a track ...”

“... recollection. Test it. Remember your local news anchors from when you were a child (mine were Rob Braun and Kit Andrews), describe their hair and cheekbones and your sense that they would never die, and go from there. Sing the jingle for the local pizza place. He is referred to as ‘“Irrelevant” Chris Fogle’ by the character known as David ...”

“... cannot look long at Aesop, Mars and Don Juan of Austria without their faces being shadowed by the young rifleman’s in Velázquez’s Surrender of Breda, off to the left, his green jacket and trousers an irresistible punctuation mark in the painting’s wall of browns. And I cannot take stock of the rifleman – his look out of the illusion, his exchange of ...”

“... called things like Pleasure Hammock.I twist around and see Hope making friends with a brisk-moving young Portuguese priest. He is taking a picture of her? She wore her black jumpsuit that morning, so she fits the dress code for Ladies from the ankles up, but she alone in the Sistine Chapel is wearing Birkenstocks. ‘That’s what she should be ...”

“... the world does not give us everything we deserve, but warning that any attempt to change it may rob us of what little we have.Mises was not a conservative, however. He was a radical liberal, as he explained at length in 1922 in Die Gemeinwirtschaft (‘The Collective Economy’, translated as Socialism). The book was intended as a refutation of Marxism as a ...”

“... sanitary and convenience products spewing into London’s river. Taylor Geall, the bright young fabulist charged by his Super Sewer employers, Tideway, with selling an upbeat message about reconnecting Londoners with the Thames (even when large sections of river frontage were closed off for the construction), commutes from Bognor Regis. His repurposed ...”

“... workshops at colleges and universities. (Even in his worst dope-fiend days he had enjoyed tutoring young saxophonists.) He played in Japan in the late 1970s and developed there a new and enraptured cadre of fans. ‘My reception,’ he notes in a revealing aside at the end of his memoir, ‘was overwhelming and frightening. I feel a strong obligation to return ...”