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“... Robert​ Louis Stevenson was always ill, that’s what people said, and in the late summer of 1884 he decided he wouldn’t return to the South of France, where he’d spent the past year and a half in a house called La Solitude. His wife, Fanny, sought the advice of his London doctors, who recommended Davos in the Swiss mountains as being cholera-free, but Stevenson fancied southern England ...”

“... may come from invention as well. One of the most vivid Anglo-versions of French social history was Robert Baldick’s Dinner at Magny’s (1971), in which everything that was spoken by the famous literary diners was a true quote, while the context and narrative furniture were often arranged, or rearranged. And Robb’s stories are, after ...”

“... destroyed. It remains unaffected and whole even when the people united by it are already in their graves.’ Against this true church of values, the heretical cliques of the Soviet establishment could not finally prevail, though they did indeed win in the short run, by shooting Gumilev (Akmatova’s first husband) in 1921, by hounding Mandelstam to exile and ...”

“... burying a few thousand of us. He may yet bury more. We, of course, are sending his kind to their graves in Afghanistan, Iraq and other corners of the Islamic patrimony. Osama’s is a two-theatre war: one on the battlefield, the other on the airwaves. For a guy on the run, he is not doing badly. Although his loyalists are killed, wounded and ...”

“... not wrong. Manson: The Life and Times of Charles Manson is a cradle-to-grave treatment, though the graves belong to other people. The subject remains in California, an inmate at Corcoran State Prison, where he issues statements his followers disseminate via the website of his Air Trees Water Animals organisation. A recent example: ‘We have two worlds that ...”

“... foreknowledge, fragmentary but direct, of events in the world before her birth, and the neonate Robert, in Edward St Aubyn’s Mother’s Milk, not only remembers being born (someone ‘clamping his head and wrenching his neck from side to side’) but the preceding state of bliss – ‘never the whole thing again, the whole warm thing all around ...”

“... understanding view, and may even have accused Owen of cowardice, a slur that found its way into Robert Graves’s Goodbye to All That. But the army should be given credit for the treatment Owen received at hospitals in France and Hampshire, and then at Craiglockhart, where Arthur Brock implemented a regime that he called ‘ergotherapy’, a kind of ...”

“... swept the city: ‘In an unconsecrated corner near the great Central Cemetery I saw the newly dug graves of many Lebensmüde, who by their own hands had sought that rest which was denied to them in life.’The British were not yet minded to save Jews, although they would take a small number of them as servants. One enterprising man (the purged manager of the ...”

“... as George Cornell, the gangster shot by the Kray Twins in The Blind Beggar pub. But it was the graves and sentry toys of the unknown children that had lodged in my mind. The trees were bare, filtering light on the tombstones and pointing down at the stories gathered there. When I say ‘stories’, I don’t only mean the ones clinging to the ...”

“... safe to sleep in the daytime. Two visited cemeteries during the night and one admitted desecrating graves; two were arsonists. They also had periods when they ‘lost time’, periods which might last minutes or hours. The women talked about the ‘ordinary’ sexual abuse that they had experienced in childhood long before they began to float details of ritual ...”

“... manners.Except that now, telling the story, I can’t be sure that it was Ronald Colman and not Robert Donat, who was certainly more likely to be in Leeds and indeed in England and who was known to be shy (and, as Mam said, ‘a martyr to asthma’) and therefore more likely to bolt from the shop.Cherished and admired as a local boy was Eric Portman, who ...”

“... travellers carried it with them as a vade mecum or guidebook. Coryate met the adventurer Sir Robert Shirley in the hinterlands of Persia, and was chuffed when he took ‘both my bookes neatly kept’ from his luggage. In the autumn of 1612 Coryate left England, for what would prove to be the last time, en route for the East. Sometime before leaving he ...”

“... anti-communist line held against fashionable opinion in the 1960s and after by Kingsley Amis and Robert Conquest. It also contains a letter from Amis to Christopher Hitchens, which is needling enough (‘Do you admire terror? I know you admire freedom’) in the rhetorical pressure it applies on an old friend to renounce Lenin, Trotsky and all their ...”

“... to write a comparable book about this time [called] “The Missiles of October”,’ his brother Robert quotes him as saying. ‘If anyone is around after this they are going to understand that we made every effort to find peace.’ Following Tuchman, he believed that European statesmen ‘somehow seemed to tumble into war’, because of their ...”

“... properly be marked by a lowering of flags, Last Posts, and salutations toward long-obliterated graves. Most black citizens and increasingly numerous white ones know it, with many – but not all – historians among them. The ABA has had a rocky ride since its establishment, by a hopeful Fraser Government in 1981, with public fights, expensive ...”