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“... on some rails laid through an apple orchard.Everything recurs. Nothing gets lost in the desert, Paul Bowles writes. ‘Wichtiges kommt wieder,’ is the way German puts it: important things return. But perhaps one doesn’t know that. Hence Hrabal’s gushing sentences, his spiral or circular forms, his pages written for ‘the luxury of diagonal ...”

“... personality we know very little, is ranked among the greatest of theologians, next only to St Paul and St Augustine. Of his publications, the centrepiece is the dauntingly hefty Summa Theologiae. In its dry, brisk, low-key manner, this formidable compendium of theology, metaphysics, ethics and psychology ranges from Thomas’s celebrated demonstrations of ...”

“... He flexed his knuckles and brought one hand up to join the other. The arch of his right foot tautened and the slack weight of his body hung between these extremities, slung like a carcass from a pole. He could not hold himself here for long. A vague outswelling created an overhang whose brow rolled back out of sight. He thought of the arc his arm ...”

“... we finance emergency and trauma care? What about cancer care? Hospital care in general? How do we foot these bills as well as bills for prevention and primary care, so often pitted against the sort of hospital care I received but my Haitian colleagues did not? I would have been wise to look both ways before I crossed, but wouldn’t have wanted the ambulance ...”

“... Britain in 1951 knew what to celebrate. At the start of the opening ceremony – a service in St Paul’s – the King praised the nation’s courage in the world wars; the official handbook declared categorically that ‘Britain is a Christian Community’; brightly coloured pavilions on the South Bank paid tribute to picturesque countryside, seaside ...”

“... on a courtesy visit to the USSR, as it then was, in 1988, a party which included Craig Raine, Paul Bailey and Timothy Mo. I don’t remember laughing more on any trip before or since; we were a very silly group, so much so that we often mystified our hosts and sometimes behaved disgracefully. Sue – and I even noticed this in the photo the Guardian used ...”

“... in the late 1960s, the Mexico City Metro remained futuristic enough to serve as the backdrop for Paul Verhoeven’s 1990 version of Total Recall. Villoro says there is still fake blood splattered on the ceiling of Chabacano station. ‘City characters’ is one of the six themes Villoro uses to guide us through the megalopolis. Other strands address ...”

“... work. During his clandestine excursion to Lascaux, made before any archaeologists had set foot there, Champerret had not only evaluated the caves’ potential for Resistance operations, but had looked very closely at the paintings, and particularly at the signs and marks. He used his skills as a codebreaker to examine them, and the notebooks contain ...”

“... caused a hoarseness that was cured in April 1932 after voice training from the celebrated tenor Paul Devrient. So, curiously, both Hitler and George VI benefited from the attentions of a speech therapist, though for opposite reasons: Hitler spoke too much; the king found public speaking too difficult to do it very often. The hoarseness returned in ...”

“... his painting became increasingly broad and loose – ‘sketchy but superb’, as the dealer Paul Durand-Ruel called it. The generalisation of the drawing gave even more scope for his rich, flowing colours to mingle and heighten one another. Barnes was right in saying that ‘colour takes command, as it were, of the total design by becoming the agent of ...”

“... The silhouette of Cesar Augusto Sandino, his hands clasped behind his back, his left foot pointing outwards, wearing high-laced army boots and a ten-gallon hat, is the universal emblem of Nicaragua’s revolutionary movement. In the 1920s Sandino led a prolonged guerrilla campaign against the US marines who had been occupying his country since 1912 ...”

“... Wilde. He detested the primacy accorded to art over life, and detested homosexuals even more. Paul Claudel, the Catholic writer-diplomat, undiplomatically called the Surrealists a bunch of ‘pederasts’. Breton was outraged, not only because in his own case it was inaccurate, but because, for someone who shared Claudel’s homophobic views, it was ...”

“... the family home in Fingerbone – which, for good measure, they set ablaze – and they set out by foot across the railway bridge that stretches over Fingerbone Lake, in whose waters both Ruth’s grandfather and her mother perished, the first in a train accident, the second a suicide. ‘When did I become so unlike other people?’ Ruth wonders in the ...”

“... hatched adjective ‘electric’ to describe him; the other was sickly, pallid and had a club foot. Politically, one wanted to conquer the world, while the other thought France would do very well within its ‘natural boundaries’, and even conspired with the country’s enemies to put it back there. The two most familiar images of the men express the ...”

“... whom he appeared (as Auden once succinctly put it) ‘a most bleak old bore’. The distinction of Paul Hamilton’s formidable new book, Metaromanticism, is the success with which it translates these Romantic predicaments into contemporary terms, so as to make them feel wholly up-to-date. The subject is properly convoluted and Hamilton’s prose is not shy of ...”