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“... left behind no memoir when his chronically weak chest finally undid him at the age of 51. Instead, Frank Prochaska has stitched together this self-portrait out of the boxfuls of essays, letters and articles he did leave. These have been republished in multi-volume editions three times, by Forrest Morgan in 1889, by one of the Wilson sisters, Emilie ...”

“... and, according to Sharon, menavulim, a word meaning ‘malevolent criminals’. In her diary Anne Frank wrote of the German plan to ‘cleanse’ Utrecht of Jews ‘as if the Jews were cockroaches’ – a description applied to the Palestinians by the Israeli Chief of Staff General Eitan. It is easier to kill people if you think of them as animals, just as ...”

“... politics will therefore turn eagerly to the essay by our leading economic theorist, Professor Frank Hahn. What does high theory have to offer the practical politician? In his preface Professor Hahn tells us that new thinking by himself and others has led him to ‘almost inevitable’ answers which ‘bear a close family resemblance to propositions found ...”

“... happy, when she had last not been nervous. But it is not just women who are the victims in Smile: Frank, in ‘Making hay’, has just learned that he has leukaemia and can’t bring himself to tell anyone, least of all his childless, highly-strung Hungarian wife, Dorizia, who would ‘smother him in her arms and soak him with her tears’. In a ...”

“... It contains much of the background material she would use a few years later in A Stricken Field, a full-length novel set in Czechoslovakia. It is one of the finest reports in this collection, depicting a country in turmoil, with large numbers of refugees on the move like insects seething over a tree stump. Yet the scale of the disaster is relentlessly ...”

“... on, sustained by his mother’s favourite quotation (which stands as the novel’s epigraph): Anne Frank’s ‘In spite of everything, I still believe people are really good at heart.’ But, of course, Anne wrote that before the Germans got her. Thomas Keneally likes to run his fiction close to historical fact. An appended note to A Family Madness indicates ...”

“... in Kilclooney, a place so small it’s hard to find on any map. ‘Would Kilclooney mean church field?’ I ask Barry as we sit in the bar in the heel of the day. ‘It would, Tomás,’ he says, then instantly produces etymologies and all sorts of words in Irish – way beyond the dozen I vaguely know, and can never pronounce right. Barry has two languages ...”

“... manifestations of the zombie, began life as a Japanese video game; the grisliest films in the field are Italian; and there’s now a Bollywood zombie film. In all these works, the individual’s enemy is the undistinguishable mass, and indeed ever since George Romero it’s en masse that the zombies have come. The zombie has turned into the Malthusian ...”

“... before 1933 became easy and familiar, a rarity with Hitler. Röhm, Hess, Goebbels, Hans Frank and many other friends of Hitler came and went . . . He enjoyed the family and artistic atmosphere at home with the Wagners, playing the kind uncle to the Wagner children, and fancied himself a friend of the arts. Almost every sentence jars. Hamann ...”

“... different, but the unself-conscious way with which Zagajewski handles this ‘I’ brings to mind Frank O’Hara. Certainly, it wouldn’t be easy to say who is the more charming, and charm is very much the issue. The difference is that in O’Hara the ‘I’ (as in ‘I do this, I do that’) is the repository of all charm: the poems are, in Norman ...”

“... in ‘an extravagant, eye-catching green robe, bought for him, in Tunis she thought, by his Aunt Frank on his first transatlantic trip’. Elective affinity was everything. As Williams said of Pound: ‘It took just one look and I knew it was it.’ Their relationship had a note of comedy in it: ‘He was impressed with his own poetry,’ Williams ...”

“... did not draw on classical literature. Women could be ‘lovers of their own sex’ or, in the more frank Greek loan word, ‘tribades’ (literally ‘rubbers’; the words ‘rubster’ and ‘fricatrice’ were also used in the 17th century). The OED cites no usage of ‘lesbianism’ in the modern sense before 1870, when it was used to argue that ...”

“... but relations became strained last year when Moscow denounced its rapporteur, Britain’s Frank Judd, and refused to go on working with him. Judd’s successor, the Swiss Andreas Gross, was allowed into Chechnya in August in spite of criticising the lack of democracy in the elections Russia organised. Gross believes that the world has to work with the ...”

“... nursing, first from Russell, then from a long succession of others including W.E. Johnson, Frank Ramsey, Keynes, Moore, Sraffa, Norman Malcolm and finally, literally, from Dr Bevan and his family, who took him into their home and cared for him during his final illness. It is amazing to think of those ornaments of the golden age of the don, seemingly ...”

“... Marilyn Monroe fucked both Kennedy brothers before taking her own life, if she did indeed take it. Frank Sinatra raised money for the Reagans and acted as at least a confidante to the First Lady. Norman Podhoretz’s son-in-law Elliott Abrams, while working as Reagan’s Assistant Secretary of State, dunned the Sultan of Brunei for a $10 million backhander to ...”