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“... has nothing to do with O. Henry, whose actual (or alleged) last words are recorded in C. Alphonso Smith’s biography of 1916: ‘He was perfectly conscious until within two minutes of his death Sunday morning,’ said Doctor Hancock, ‘and knew that the end was approaching. I never saw a man pluckier in facing it or in bearing pain. Nothing appeared to ...”

“... which Boyd was a stronger suspect than the man originally charged with Nikki’s murder. As Wright drew the jury’s attention to them, it began to feel as if he were also prosecuting the original police inquiry.Heron,​ then 23, who lived on the same floor of Wear Garth as Nikki’s grandparents and Boyd, was arrested on 15 October 1992. Police computers had ...”

“... A Life (1989). To these I can now add some findings of my own. Sarah Walker was born on Great Smith Street, in Westminster, shortly before midnight on 11 November 1800. She was the second of six children – four girls, two boys – of Micaiah Walker, tailor, and his wife Martha, née Hilditch. The family was of Dorset origin: Anthony Walker, Sarah’s ...”

“... Jones calls it – has Le Corbusier, Aalto, Frank Lloyd Wright among its heroes. Maxwell Fry, Jane Drew, Ove Arup, Lionel Esher and, in time, Frank Lloyd Wright (met, as it happens, in Russia) were among his admiring friends. And I can vouch for his fascination with Buckminster Fuller’s Geodesics (though not with the jaw-breaking language involved), and the ...”

“... of power over his oppressors. He is a man who has ‘evened the score’.Frantz Fanon drew on Native Son to examine the violent impulses that racism creates in its victims. ‘Bigger Thomas … is afraid, terribly afraid. But afraid of what?’ Fanon wrote in Black Skin, White Masks in 1952. ‘Of himself. We don’t yet know who he is, but he ...”

“... she was spared the sight of Greater Romania vomiting up its gains.Her state funeral in Bucharest drew a quarter of a million people. The coffin, draped in mauve and covered with her standard, was carried out of the royal palace and placed on a gun carriage drawn by six black horses. A salute of 75 guns was fired, aeroplanes roared overhead, church bells ...”

“... It is noticeable that the one outstanding exception, the remarkable work of Jonathan Zittell Smith, a brilliant mind by any measure, should avoid so much as a mention of Weber’s name in connection with his subject. In it comparison alters focus, completely. Taking not only an expressly anthropological approach to the study of religion, but ...”

“... only at the end of a book, but throughout. Wilde pushed his luck by refusing to gratify them. W.H. Smith retaliated by pulling the issue of Lippincott’s that contained the story from the shelves of its stores. ‘Dullness and dirt,’ the Daily Chronicle declared in its review. Dorian was ‘a poisonous book, the atmosphere of which is heavy with the ...”

“... set in an ultra-violent 19th-century gold-rush town in Indian territory, outside US jurisdiction, drew a committed audience, critical love and big prizes until HBO pulled the plug, probably for financial reasons. Biskind picks it out, with its grandiloquent, high frequency cussing, its corpse count and its brutal bordello – and its longer story arc, about a ...”

“... members of TCBS were killed on the Western Front: Rob Gilson on the first day of the Somme, G.B. Smith from shell wounds a few months after. ‘My chief consolation is that if I am scuppered tonight . . . there will still be left a member of the great TCBS to voice what I dreamed and what we all agreed upon,’ Smith had ...”

“... flooded and the walls were wet with damp. When they spent part of the summer of 1919 there, Yeats drew an idyllic picture for his father. ‘It may well be,’ William Murphy later wrote in his biography of Yeats’s father, ‘that one of the happiest days of his life was 16 July 1919. Fishing in the stream by the tower, with George sewing and “Anne lying ...”

“... up into a watchtower and asked the ANA soldier on guard what had happened to the Taliban. He drew his finger across his throat and laughed. A Brit told me the man had been executed, but another said he’d been taken to the nearest base and arrested. It’s often hard to know what to believe, as British soldiers are given LTTs (‘lines to take’) when ...”

“... or hangers-on. Both men were on horseback. They met near a stream. Without warning, naughty Fateh drew his sword, and with a single superbly executed blow, severed his older brother’s head from his body. The mare on which the slain man was riding galloped back with the decapitated body to the stables on his estate. The feud started there. The widow ...”

“... electricity companies’ minuscule debts and the fat profits they were making under RPI-X drew predators from across the Atlantic, and when the government’s golden share in the firms lapsed in 1995, the Americans pounced. Just as California was making the disastrous decision to imitate the British model in opening up its own electricity system to ...”

“... and also get, a hit of solid senior-common-room emollience.The lifelong strength that Berlin drew from his 1917 baptism was, however, often applied in less obvious ways. I was fascinated to learn, from Ignatieff, that his Latvian family had a direct kinship with the Schneerson clan who ran, and still run, the fanatical sect known as Lubavitch or ...”