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“... is unlikely to impose serious pressure, or to cut off aid: as the White House press secretary Robert Gibbs stressed on 31 January, when Mubarak was still clinging to power, ‘it is not up to us to determine when the grievances of the Egyptian people have been met by the Egyptian government’. With their self-contained military cities, where comfortable ...”

“... smell that some people say drifts in from the countryside, a folk memory of what these clipped green acres used, so recently, to be. Mulch of market gardens. Animal droppings in hot mounds. The distant rumble of construction convoys. The heron dance of elegant cloud-scraping cranes. Flocks of cyclists clustering together for safety, dipping and swerving ...”

“... are mingling, too, with many who are long dead. Ronald Reagan and Meryl Streep, Bette Davis and Robert De Niro jostle closely together in several large spaces, chambers for different sins in the afterlife – for vamping, sharp-shooting, taxi-driving – while a flickering crowd comes and goes in an endless loop on screens and monitors. The stars have been ...”

“... I didn’t hold it against him personally, although I was mad at the people who picked him.’ In Robert Budreau’s film Born to be Blue, Baker plays at about this time to an audience that includes Davis and Gillespie. Gillespie is friendly, Davis is patronising. The playing was sweet, he says, ‘like candy’. He advises Baker to come back when he has ...”

“... on activists or the lawyers who defend them. In sentencing the Preston New Road campaigners, Judge Robert Altham said that the defendants’ views on the dangers posed by fracking made them more deserving of prison sentences, not less, because there was ‘no realistic prospect of rehabilitation’. Since he refused to hear evidence related to the case against ...”

“... at the International African Institute, just as the community portrayed in her last novel, A Few Green Leaves, has clear affinities with Finstock, the village near Oxford to which she retired. On the central question of the interaction between her artistic and her emotional life we shall have to wait for Hazel Holt’s biography for authoritative ...”

“... to do with Pindar. Elsewhere, when a certain grossness is needed, the chance is missed. Both Sir Robert Stapylton (1647) and Henry Fielding (1743) have a go at translating Juvenal’s ferocious account of the profligate Empress Messalina working as a prostitute in a Roman brothel and both suppress Juvenal’s reference to gilded nipples (‘papillis ...”

“... novel Smoke. In postwar Leeds, the city in which McKie grew up, the corporation buses were green – a colour chosen, he recalls, because the Conservatives objected to the implicit socialism of the city’s red trams. The buses helped to define the town: ‘Their corporate presence spoke of continuity, civic pride and a sense of place, where the ...”

“... of Kafka’s art. Chief among these were the voices of Walter Benjamin, Maurice Blanchot, Marthe Robert and Erich Heller. Heller’s essay on The Castle in The Disinherited Mind (1952) marked a real turning point. He argued persuasively that it was folly to go on debating whether Kafka was religious or anti-religious, Marxist or bourgeois, Calvinist or ...”

“... presiding presence; his poetry is the bar before which other poets –Auden and Eliot, Hardy and Robert Lowell and Browning. Pound and, yes, Hill – are brought to judgment. This is not overt. Robinson can’t, any more than the rest of us, come on like a latter-day Leavis, a fearlessly normative critic; instead, psychologists and moral philosophers are ...”

“... doubt my obsession with Somalia had something to do with pride in having crossed Mogadishu’s ‘green line’, and drawn a warning round or two from armed looters in the port. I suspect, however, that the real attraction lay in the fact that so few others knew quite how good the Somalia story was, or indeed quite how bad. The few others became many in ...”

“... we believe the words enough? Do we think the leavings of a life contain some ancillary truth? When Robert Louis Stevenson died his business-minded Scottish nanny quietly began selling locks of the infant’s hair which she claimed to have cut forty years earlier. The believers, the seekers, the pursuers bought enough hair to stuff a sofa. The house of Croisset ...”

“... The first grieving person to arrive was a big man in his late fifties, wearing a yellow and green polo shirt stretched tight over his stomach. I realised that he was one of the people we were all here for because the words ‘Can I help you?’ seemed to sink into him, rather than leaving him unaffected, or making him conventionally polite, or ...”

“... of meticulous damage. His ‘haruspication of pods’ in the title poem ‘Pea Soup’ are green victims who cascade their entrails to a jab of the thumb ‘like so many plump suspension-dots’. The pretty epanorthosis of ‘meticulous damage’ would have been appreciated by readers of The Shepheard’s Calender, connoisseurs of tropes such as ...”

“... as Stiomrebhaigh), a site of extraordinary beauty and habitability, is still mantled in dense green turf, backed by an outcrop for building stone, with a peat moss just yards away. The best houses were roomy, with vegetable fields enclosed by stone dykes. A stand of aspens chatters on the bluff above a river flowing out of a circular tidal lochan which ...”