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“... series which concerns his finances, letters to his legal adviser, William Pyne, and to his tailor, Richard Culverwell. There has been a long upper-class tradition of owing money to one’s tailor – which, no doubt, explains the inordinate prices charged in those days. Disraeli, characteristically, went a step further and actually borrowed money from his ...”

“... that frightfully dreary thing in the East End?’ At the end of Carousel at the National Theatre, Richard Eyre escorts her to the door: ‘I’m glad you enjoyed the show.’ ‘I didn’t, I can’t bear the piece.’She was just as rude and inconsiderate in private, late to arrive and even later to leave which meant that nobody else could leave ...”

“... correlatives in literature’ – in Malcolm Bradbury, as it isn’t perhaps needless to say, and Martin Amis. Perhaps there is wisdom in Howard Brenton’s observation that what binds us together in this period is nothing more than ‘a profound unease’. It is here, approaching the end of his study, that Appleyard chooses, or is compelled, to make some ...”

“... fanfare for the ambitions of the sequence as a whole, and preferred to kick off with the gigantic Richard’s Feet, which traces the career of Richard Thurgo, a London solicitor, in post-war Hamburg where he is masquerading as an ex-Nazi. Back in England, Thurgo has been presumed dead for some twenty years after his body ...”

“... the ceremony would be ‘inconvenient’. Senna, a young Brazilian woman told the Independent’s Richard Williams, ‘was our hero. Our only one.’ Senna’s triumph, like Pele’s before him, was to have beaten the North at one of its own games. And the North, angry Brazilians wanted to believe, had killed him. A million or so of Sao Paulo’s 15 million ...”

“... atmosphere on arrival. It was discovered later that engineers working for the contractor, Lockheed Martin, had programmed the software to give altitude data in imperial units, while those of its partner, Nasa, had used metric – a three hundred million dollar oops. But no one died. And it is death or its prevention, more so even than money, that is the ...”

“... the US as a sinister maritime republic with an all-powerful navy (Ahab is a fighting Quaker like Richard Nixon), Marvell hints at what the future may hold for a Commonwealth that has no institutional continuity. The theme of wounded male narcissism – the mower on a hot day mown, self-injured – may be one way of giving imaginative shape to what it feels ...”

“... 1965 people had long been curious about this very famous man. Collections such as the one made by Richard Marsh and Tambimuttu for his 60th birthday in 1948 contained much pleasant anecdote, and there were respectful reminiscences in Allen Tate’s memorial volume of 1966. Meanwhile, off the page, there was some gossip about such matters as a putatively vast ...”

“... to get into an argument about anything and anyone, even with her former lover and lifelong friend Martin Heidegger. Clearly, she was prepared to take on nearly everyone close to her in New York when her Eichmann book appeared in 1963. Like most others he knew, Podhoretz found much to disapprove of in the book. Besides her many disparaging references to ...”

“... fiction of Elie Wiesel to George Steiner’s ruminations in In Bluebeard’s Castle and Richard Rubenstein’s The Cunning of History. But to insist on the uniqueness of the event is a short step to insisting on the exclusiveness of interpretation which asserts an empathetic privilege and even a Jewish proprietorship in the subject. Seven years ...”

“... When​ Richard Wright sailed to France in 1946, he was 38 years old and already a legend. He was America’s most famous black writer, the author of two books hailed as classics the moment they were published: the 1940 novel Native Son and the 1945 memoir Black Boy. By ‘choosing exile’, as he put it, he hoped both to free himself from American racism and to put an ocean between himself and the Communist Party of the United States, in which he’d first come to prominence as a writer of proletarian fiction only to find himself accused of subversive, Trotskyist tendencies ...”

“... published a generation ago, in 1959, which includes over a hundred pages on Spanish painting by Martin Soria. Brown’s account differs from Soria’s in several important respects. In the first place, it makes some significant changes to the canon. One of the artists revalued is Juan Bautista Maino (a follower of Caravaggio who more or less gave up ...”

“... when we drove through the Deep South en route to Mexico. In his ‘Letter from Birmingham Jail’, Martin Luther King had called it the biggest segregated city in the United States; it was certainly the meanest. After weeks of Freedom Riders and crusading black children, Governor George Wallace had called out the state guard to help Police Chief Bull Connor ...”

“... readiness to immerse himself in the archives and tease out the meaning of details reminds me of Richard Cobb, though perhaps a more appropriate comparison would be another famous archival mole, Jules Michelet, who also wrote about women and the sea, and tried to unravel the substance from which France was made. As Michelet put it in a famous passage, which ...”

“... a phrase, a little high culture, but it has eerie undertones if you think about it. The soon-to-be Richard III had a very particular discontent in mind, and he had extreme solutions for it. Right at the end of the movie, a group of children in a classroom rise in turn, each saying, ‘I am Malcolm X,’ and of course this is attractive in terms of the fairy ...”