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“... at that time, even more so for one from the depths of the country. St Ita’s was a place where young ladies visited museums in school hours, held classes in the garden and immersed themselves in Ireland’s Celtic culture. The girls there read Yeats and Synge as contemporary writers and steeped themselves in the myths and folklore of ancient Ireland. Above ...”

“... a family of five, where kids in High Kindergarten are given LSD and peyote by their parents, where young hustlers get lethally carried away while rolling elderly film-stars, where six-foot-two drag queens shop for fishnet bikinis, where a 26-year-old woman can consign her five-year-old daughter to the centre divider of Interstate 5: when her fingers were ...”

“... were infantry officers of some eminence. In the page of mug-shots at the end of this book, Sir Warren Fisher, head of the Civil Service and nominally of the Treasury, too, for virtually the whole interwar period, looks wonderfully haughty and disdainful in his black topper. Sir Richard Hopkins, who headed the Treasury team for most practical purposes in ...”

“... iron will was an auxiliary of my most bizarre fantasies,’ he wrote, thinking mostly of money and young women. In 1796, at the age of 21, he was sentenced to eight years’ hard labour. A week after arriving at the hulks of Brest, he was heading east, dressed as a sailor, and for the next 13 years he kept on escaping. ‘I escaped from all the galleys of ...”

“... to grit its teeth and dig in its heels.’ In his 1951 campaign to ‘liquidate Stone’ (the young historian Lawrence Stone), he composed what was later described as ‘one of the most vitriolic attacks ever made by one historian on another’. Victims constantly used the word ‘malicious’ about his choice of language, and Trevor-Roper himself often ...”

“... 1915). And he may be the only 20th-century reader of The Biography of Elder Brown Warren Stone written by himself, with Additions and Reflections by Elder John Rogers (Cincinnati, 1847). He describes the way you could make out the shape of his uncle’s toes through the leather of his shoes. He evokes the prosperous farming community of ...”

“... garden of Ruth’s childhood home. It is a huge, dilapidated structure, in whose sinister pit the young child was placed by her father (‘To cool me off’); it is also the place where the father was neglected and left to die, after a shooting accident, by his implacable wife. But when the ‘ice-house’ returns metamorphosed, as a tomb in the Egyptian ...”

“... broadcasting’s Gormenghast . . . unsuitable for modern programme-making . . . a festering rabbit-warren sheltering hidden cliques’. In the Panorama offices, ‘larger-than-life reporters . . . had effectively seized power.’ The programme itself ‘lacked rigour’, ‘was not addressing the key stories of the time’ and was ‘often unfair’. The ...”

“... than the subversion of French democracy’. To make his point Shaxson takes us into a ‘rabbit warren’ which he enters in Libreville in Gabon, where he is collected from the airport by a man wearing ‘aviator sunglasses’ and driven in a red sports car to meet a mysterious French businessman called Alain Autogue. Autogue escorts him to a fancy beach ...”

“... in existential torment, Warhol put pretty-boy idols of mass culture up front, such as the young Troy Donahue and Warren Beatty, Elvis and Brando, all subjects of early silkscreens. More notoriously, he did the same with the not-so-pretty Thirteen Most Wanted Men, the FBI mug-shots that he silkscreened for the ...”

“... rebellion – France. Some became nabobs and built or bought grand houses in Scotland; one died young in war; two governed indigenous peoples in vast provinces; four became MPs. All cultivated connections with financial and political power, and shared those connections in lively letters which circulated round the family and round much of the known world. It ...”

“... side of the family with his father’s sense of himself as a would-be wealthy person.Scenes of the young Biden ingratiating himself to Republicans recur during a youth spent winging it, hustling, and depending on the kindness of a series of characters who, in the words of his letters of recommendation, took ‘a chance’ on him despite his ‘lousy ...”

“... to where I was in a way that my friends’ families didn’t’. The other three all died young of heroin overdoses. ‘Sonny doesn’t need drugs,’ Cliffy would say, ‘he’s high on himself!’Despite her love of cinema, his mother tried to protect him from an acting career, saying it wasn’t for poor people. Pacino squandered his first big ...”

“... a world of imagination in which she controlled everything that happened. She went on to create young women somewhat like herself, but whose perceptions and judgments were shown to matter; who were able to influence their own fates significantly, and who could even give their parents good advice. Her delight in this work is obvious. It’s pity that this ...”

“... of his local congregation, and encouraging an unbreakably strong bond with his older brother, Warren (‘Warnie’). He mostly hated his schooldays in England, but flourished under the supervision of an eccentric private coach, sufficiently so to gain a place at Oxford. For a healthy British male, November 1916 was not the best moment to have one’s 18th ...”