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“... we know from The Canterbury Tales) and submission to ‘the authority of the circumstance’ which John Bayley has ascribed to the pastoral mode in literature. But not the peculiarly Indian circumstance, for these characters and their situations, no matter how carefully located in Malgudi, have an innate tendency to turn themselves into universal ...”

“... a book on New York street slang. Frannie prides herself on her independence and toughness. She freely explores the dark Soho streets, hangs out in the Pussy Cat Bar with her best friend Pauline, and keeps a personal dictionary of words for ‘Vagina’ – Virginia, snapper, gash, brasole – as well as words for ‘guns’, ‘drugs’ and ...”

“... covering the case of a teenage boy who had been beaten up by a policeman in Thurso, which is near John o’Groats. There was the most fearful hullabaloo based on the belief that this sort of thing could only happen in the wilderness of the Far North. The press demanded that this errant policeman be brought to justice. There was a similar furore a year or two ...”

“... 23 months, yet in March when the tremendous blow strikes, the news that somehow or other, while in John Stuart Mill’s care, his just finished first volume, which pleased him ‘better than anything’ he had ever done, had been used as kindling, he and Jane respond without bitterness and with total courage to the emergency. As Carlyle sets out to write a new ...”

“... in logic and mathematics became known to the British mathematician Max Newman, and to the great John von Neumann in Princeton. He already speculated simultaneously on the foundations of mathematics, in Hilbert’s and Gödel’s sense, and on the conceivable capacities and limits of computing machines, and this combination of interests was his genius. He ...”

“... reverted to resembling, in the American mind, something far worse than partes infidelium. The John Birch Society, an important orchestrator of American paranoia in the 1950s, was named for an American missionary who had supposedly been martyred by the Reds. Indeed, the Cold War and McCarthyite atmosphere in the United States was attributable much more to ...”

“... The trial of Dr John Bodkin Adams at the Old Bailey in 1957 was one of the causes célèbres of the post-war years. Apart from sex, it had everything. Adams was a fashionable Eastbourne doctor. Portly. With a chauffeur-driven Rolls. Charged with murdering one of his rich old women patients, for a chest of silver. There were strong hints she was not his only victim ...”

“... dress suit. It might almost be mistaken for the dénouement of an early Sherlock Holmes story: Dr John H. Watson describing the scene in an East End police station when Holmes literally unmasks the man with an old scar running across his face from eye to chin which turned up his lip into a perpetual grimace, a ‘crippled wretch of hideous aspect’ who hid ...”

“... Life of Huldrych Zwingli with a couplet: ‘Some talk of Martin Luther and some of Calvin (John)/But Zwingli’s hardly mentioned this side of Zollikon.’ Nevertheless, one can’t deny the truth of it. Potter’s admirable book piled up the evidence that would allow English-speakers to reassess Switzerland’s pioneer Reformer, but, nearly half a ...”

“... he was eventually arrested, four years later, he was living in Yorkshire under the pseudonym of John Palmer. He came to the attention of the authorities only because, returning one day from hunting, he had shot a tame bird; reprimanded by a bystander, he replied that if the man would only stay while he charged his piece, he would shoot him too. Charles ...”

“... with ideas, they suffer in style. ‘Everything,’ writes Axel Vander, the sly hero-narrator of John Banville’s Shroud, ‘has to be qualified.’ And style is the way the writer qualifies himself, or whatever it is he feels is in need of qualification. The question Banville has always asked in his novels is: what must a self, or an identity or a narrator ...”

“... the iconic and rare-as-hen’s-teeth ‘Multimedia Magazine in a Box’ with work by Andy Warhol, John Cage, John Lennon and Roland Barthes. There’s no shortage of big names mixed in with the obscure stuff – but they’re often not doing what you might expect. As well as Slonimsky’s hymn to Castoria, there are Samuel ...”

“... to populate the lawn with so many tiny toads that it was impossible to cut the grass.He drank freely, sometimes a great deal, even to the point of unsteadiness, but he was no lush. He used alcohol as an essential concomitant to his work, especially when beginning a piece. Having done all the necessary reading and mentally formulated his thesis, he would ...”

“... in the subject itself. A poet’s earliest efforts are usually marred by self-consciousness and John Berryman’s are no exception to the rule. For most poets, however, finding a distinct and convincing voice is, at least in part, a process of shedding unwanted affectations and exaggerated self-importance. For Berryman the process was reversed. He learnt to ...”

“... So she protested but her heart was not in the protest, and she was glad when she could surrender freely to his passion.For 12 days he kept her at Dunbar Castle – his passionate mistress and his most willing slave.In the second volume, there is more space for villains as Mary is held in many damp castles. There are new rules at every move, plus ...”