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“... increasing weight; to his immense satisfaction he found that in the later stages of his obesity St Thomas Aquinas had had a semicircular piece taken out of an altar so he could continue to say mass, but in the winter of 1915 he dieted strictly and listened to his wife play the piano with greater attention. When the Italians declared war and advanced on the ...”

“... lobby was beautifully arranged. The room was wide with large windows overlooking the Herzliya beach: the view dazzled the eyes. I went over to the journalists’ stand, gave them my best smile and nonchalantly pulled out my press card. A feeling of importance came over me. The world outside was forgotten. The woman behind the desk checked my ...”

“... him that night at UCLA, but before that we had the whole day. We took a cab first to Venice Beach, so that Jason could pay homage to Arnold Schwarzenegger. ‘Remember when he says that he feels the pump and it’s like khumming all over his whole body?’ he asked wistfully. Then we stopped in a juice shop. A woman turned to me just as I was taking a ...”

“... of Finnegans Wake, Jolas was one of the editorial entrepreneurs of Modernism; like Sylvia Beach and Harriet Shaw Weaver, a supporting player in the long-running and bloody saga of publishing Joyce that is central to the myth of the modern. Reminiscences of Joyce (or ‘Jouasse’) in his self-imposed ‘exile’, provide some of the sharpest ...”

“... and also, among the twinkling lights out there, you could find the uncelebrated birthplace of Thomas Wolfe, the North Carolinian who wrote Look Homeward, Angel. As the truck got nearer the Waffle House, someone on the radio made the point that North Carolina was itself no stranger to hurricanes – Hazel (1954), Hugo (1989), Fran (1996), Floyd ...”

“... Sitwell enthuses over a song about Havana night life. As late as 1959, the British historian Hugh Thomas recognised that Cuba was one of the few tropical countries to have created a modern culture of its own. He also noticed that Fidel Castro owed his power not to guerrilla warfare, as he had believed before visiting Cuba, but to television. The way Castro ...”

“... East Coast filmmakers hurried West to seek maximum sunlight and maximum separation from Thomas Edison’s Motion Picture Patents Company, which demanded copyright payment or else a bullet in the expensive newfangled movie cameras. The canyons and ravines of the Hollywood Hills were the natural redoubts against the Patents Company ...”

“... Holkham is the immutable fact and she understands it entirely as it relates to her family. Thomas Coke (1697-1759), who commissioned the house, is introduced as the first earl in the fifth creation, but neither William Kent, who was largely responsible for the design, nor Capability Brown, who also worked at Holkham, merits a mention. The Codex ...”

“... Larsen. That summer, she spent most weekends alone in New York. She learned to swim (there was a beach craze popularised by Josephine Baker). ‘On Fifth Avenue one can’t tell the fays from the niggers these days,’ she wrote. Around this time, she wrote a short story called ‘Sanctuary’, which is nearly identical to ‘Mrs Adis’ by Sheila ...”

“... for which all is dark inside’? This form of question – ‘what is it like to be a bat?’ Thomas Nagel asked in a hugely influential paper in 1974 – is philosophical shorthand for asking whether a creature is conscious. Many philosophers think consciousness is an all or nothing phenomenon: you either have it or you don’t. Humans have it, as do ...”

“... think-tankers and media magnates with bin Salman’s plans for the kingdom. Not long afterwards, Thomas Friedman of the New York Times wrote a rapturous profile – ‘I, for one, am rooting for him to succeed.’ McKinsey also sketched the framework for Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030 – a festival of privatisation, technological innovation, commercial ...”

“... 1924 Edwin had published an article called ‘Women – Free for What?’ in which, channelling Thomas Carlyle, he wrote that ‘the age is an age of work; woman desires freedom, the right of every human being; and freedom in such an age can only mean the freedom to work.’ It was Edwin who sent Women: An Inquiry to Leonard Woolf at the Hogarth Press, but ...”

“... writers: a verse recipe in the manner of William King, 21 ‘Vignettes’ based on engravings by Thomas Bewick, and some distinctly Wordsworthian landscape poems feature in his collection. But where Clampitt hops about dottily – despite the decorous appearance of her stanzas – snatching at bits of Keats and Hopkins, Lindop writes out of a deep engagement ...”

“... to Lowell, to his dead brother Gerard, and his childhood friend Sebastian Sampas, who died on the beach at Anzio. Jack Kerouac never really left home; all his roads went through him, and brought him back again and again to the home of his mother – Mémère – a home he was never certain of. I zipped up my bags, and headed off to Baltimore. My American ...”

“... I saw no good reason why I couldn’t walk the shore from the village of Grain, along Cockleshell Beach to the London Stone; or, failing that, down a track past Rose Court Farm to Grain Marsh. But maps are deceptive: they entice you with pure white space, little blue rivulets, a church with a tower, the promise of a shell-hunting foreshore; and then they hit ...”