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“... the mice-infested cake and Sir Kevin as Mr Pip tearing down the rotting curtains to let in the light. The Queen, who had the advantage of having once been a breath of fresh air herself, was unconvinced by this scenario, suspecting that this brisk Antipodean wind would in due course blow itself out. Private secretaries, like prime ministers, came and ...”

“... Linda died of emphysema in 1954. Porter, ‘a homosexual who had never seen the closet’, as Alan Jay Lerner put it, was always true to Linda in his fashion. After she had parted ways with her philandering first husband, who was reported to have had sadistic conjugal tastes, Linda ‘had had enough of the sexual side of marriage’, according to Brendan ...”

“... Goldman Sachs’s Robert Rubin to preside over the American economy, and retained and deferred to Alan Greenspan, Clinton has obviously been a good President for the business community. Indeed, he’s been so pro-business that he could not be successfully attacked by Republicans for his economic policies. So why should businessmen, who are nothing if not ...”

“... In this way, ‘Days’, though it has larger and more interesting ends in view, throws some light on the odd gaps between ‘life’ and ‘literature’, and on the always obscure and tangled relations that exist between them before ‘days’ become poems and a life turns into Works. One of the most absorbing subjects available to literary scholarship ...”

“... to the book, where Nozick once again displays his extraordinary skill at combining precision and a light touch. I dare say there have been hundreds of published stabs at the problem, a good many of which have increased our understanding of rational decision. That is the point of paradoxes: harsh confrontation, painful rethinking, new speculation, trial and ...”

“... on the one hand, Joyce and Woolf; on the other, Dorothy Richardson, Modernist, struggling to light a recalcitrant wood stove or wearing galoshes to cook breakfast in a flooded kitchen. In the Twenties and Thirties, Richardson’s work was frequently linked with that of Joyce and Woolf. By the time of Joyce’s death, his reputation was firmly ...”

“... to have a celestial source: she’s at the business of larking with the metaphysical again. Her light, worldly novels don’t exclude a salutary touch of the ineffable. There is always, for this author, some unspoken observer of people’s antics – and this makes things gloriously intriguing and rum. Her ability to shape flawless, droll, astringent ...”

“... turf, grounded in the undergrowth of a forest. These works often use materials that have come to light in the place itself – leaves, rubbed red stones, dry sticks, thorns, the dark fluid from mushroom gills, stones picked from scree, blocks of snow and slivers of ice, earth, deer-dung, scrap iron, fern fronds, spruce thinnings and off-cuts. In this, the ...”

“... wonders what this can mean. ‘Sometimes a woman is just a woman,’ Johnny says. ‘Before you light her up?’ Patrick asks. ‘No, no, that’s a cigar,’ says Johnny. The two men are then joined by Julia: ‘We’ve all been wondering what you’re up to,’ said Julia. ‘Are you baying at the moon, or working out the meaning of ...”

“... for the next three decades of frantic entanglement. Bowen had no intention of leaving her husband, Alan Cameron, to whom she was devoted. Their marriage, however, was unconsummated. Ritchie was not her first lover, but at her age, as he ungallantly observed, he might well be her last. She openly adored him, while he, an accomplished ladies’ man, longed for a ...”

“... musical innovations of the oratorios Christus and The Legend of St Elisabeth might have shed more light on a psychological change that had its roots in the Romantic fascination with the past but was rich in implications for the future – a kind of musical Pre-Raphaelitism. Liszt had retreated into religious contemplation once before, and there was nothing ...”

“... the cottages have been built. Expressionist weather systems have been brought indoors, a wall of light in the smokey darkness. These endearing celebrations of place glisten in the firelight, when the rock fields they represent are lost in the inevitable sea-fret, the mist drifting down from the hills.But they have to go, these images. They have to be stacked ...”

“... derives its artistic weight, while the ambition of a work such as Troilus is its undoing. A light-music element is found throughout Walton’s oeuvre, not only in Troilus (Pandarus’s scene at the start of Act Two is one instance) and, less surprisingly, in the one-act comedy of The Bear (Smirnov’s song, ‘Madame, je vous prie’), but even in the ...”

“... and findings, and point to intense pressure for results from frustrated military officers. In the light of these accounts, Abu Ghraib does seem to have been exceptional in its vulnerability to mortar attack, its radically overcrowded conditions, its low morale and obscure command structure, lack of coherent record-keeping and prisoner identification, and for ...”

“... they had been given as a wedding present, but she didn’t say anything. Andy switched off the light. ‘That’s better.’ He took off his shirt though not his pants and lay on the bed, his hands clasped behind his head. ‘This is awfully kind of you,’ said Mrs Donaldson, wondering at the same time if they were going to take the coverlet off ...”