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“... an innkeeper’s daughter who gave him unstinting love and his father was a stupendous role model. Thomas-Alexandre Davy de la Pailleterie was born in Santo Domingo in 1760, the illegitimate son of a French-born Marquis and Marie-Cessette Dumas, a plantation slave. Disowned by his father, he returned to France in 1786 and, taking his mother’s name, became a ...”

“... expressionist sets and costumes. The Granada chain had brought him in to help them establish a brand identity to distinguish them from the Odeons with their sleek Art Deco faience tiles and monochrome exteriors. The brief was fulfilled on a scale beyond anything they could have anticipated. Komisarjevsky’s auditoria are vivid confections, part ...”

“... up when they discovered they had got what they wanted after all. The Tories have detoxified the brand, the Lib Dems have got their first real taste of power, and Labour has got the chance for an extended wallow in righteous opposition, having finally dumped Gordon Brown in the process. Have you ever seen such happy politicians? If the voters were trying to ...”

“... and suddenly Smith was the epigone of ‘hysterical realism’, the misbegotten progeny of Thomas Pynchon and Salman Rushdie. When he repeated the charge in the Guardian after the 11 September attacks, she responded that the term was ‘painfully accurate’, and mounted a defence of David Foster Wallace and Don DeLillo, as if the prescriptive ...”

“... food mixer into the kitchen and put it on the side. You never saw a kitchen so gleaming before. Brand-new pans. Toasted sandwich makers, woks, fish-poachers, rows of spices with the seals unbroken, colanders, and rows of knives sunk in their wooden blocks. I stood for a while in the cold, glinting kitchen, where everything seemed stranded in the ...”

“... as conclusive proof that her faith in mesmeric treatment was an illusion. Later that same month, Thomas Spencer Wells, a prominent specialist in ovarian diseases, delivered a lecture on the case to the Clinical Society of London, in which he described the growth itself – displayed for the audience together with a specimen bottle of its contents – as ...”

“... with his novel Faggots. Fiction with homosexual content had trickled out through the century, from Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice to Gore Vidal’s The City and the Pillar to the work of Genet and Isherwood and Baldwin and Burroughs, but as each new novel or play or poem appeared it was treated as a one-off; if the work was a critical success it was despite ...”

“... accepting the notion of the ‘designer’, of being dictated to by a genius and subscribing to a brand (Worth was the first to sew his name into garments). By the time Champcommunal was there in the late 1920s, Maison Worth wasn’t the only atelier in town: Chanel had worked her way up to couture from making hats for the demi-mondaines; Poiret had jumped ...”

“... change ebook for Al Gore and now runs Dynamicland, a digital interface lab in Berkeley. His brand of Silicon Valley solutionism is immensely appealing to someone like Cummings, who was dazzled when he visited the lab last year. One innovation that interests him is the ‘dynamic document’, in which all the background numbers in, say, an electronic ...”

“... than we should expect Keats to represent that of the early 19th century, or James Joyce, Dylan Thomas, Ted Hughes, Anthony Burgess, Martin Amis (all OED2 authors) that of today. The opposite is true: we should expect the language of these writers to stand out in a contrasting way from current usage, although this will obviously vary from writer to writer ...”

“... own childhood. It often does. The comic war in Pantagruel is set in Utopia – Rabelais knew his Thomas More and borrowed from him both the thirsty Dipsodes and the obscure Amaurotes. In Gargantua he fits the rivalries between France and the Holy Roman Empire into the tiny world of castle, wood and ford which could be seen from the windows of his childhood ...”

“... effective rhetorically, but very significant in the medium they adopted, were journalists like Thomas Spence and Daniel Eaton, who aimed at establishing a regular readership among the just-literate with their racily named but not always racily written weeklies, Pig’s Meat and Hog’s Wash. The man who combined the rhetorical skill of Paine with the ...”

“... market, as he understood it. In 1873, he tells Tissot he is working on a picture specifically for Thomas Agnew; he also thinks that the firm might like to handle his early masterpiece Portraits dans un bureau, since it depicted the New Orleans cotton exchange; he presumed that Agnew’s, which had started in Manchester, would easily find a ...”

“... he half-recognises in a puzzled passage early in this book, he was not alone in that. Ivor Bulmer-Thomas and Lord Chalfont, he points out, also speak English with hardly a trace of a Welsh accent; and he wonders if there is something in the air or water of the Eastern Valley of Monmouthshire that washes away deviations from standard English. The answer is ...”

“... Planning Commission was supreme. Politically, they were socialist, though, as Bhagwati says, in Thomas Balogh’s sense, not Arthur Lewis’s. (‘Tommy,’ the distinguished St Lucian economist is reported to have said, ‘the difference between your socialism and mine is that when you think of socialism you think of yourself as behind the counter, whereas ...”