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“... gold. A decade after his death – and many international monetary crises later – the Bretton Woods system had collapsed and the dollar with it, while the gold price had risen to more than twenty times its old value. This gave the French Treasury one of the greatest speculative killings in history – by then the laughter had altogether ceased. De ...”

“... of India: within these loosely-defined parameters were situated schools such as Cathedral and John Connon as well as Campion, colleges like Elphinstone and St Xavier’s, the important office buildings that belonged both to the Government and to private companies, the Bombay Gymkhana club, and the Jaslok and Breach Candy Hospitals. This was where not only ...”

“... against the authoritarian powers of China and Russia and has found an influential reader in John McCain, an old-style promoter of American toughness. But it’s now quite hard to imagine Hu Jintao and Vladimir Putin, not to mention Osama bin Laden and other ‘enemies of the Free World’, quivering at the thought of a ‘concert of ...”

“... her. Hannah and her new mistress run away, and undergo harrowing adventures. They live in the woods, on berries and wild fruits, but are tracked down by agents of the far-reaching Trappe, and are imprisoned in ‘Egyptian’ darkness, in a dungeon where they fear being eaten alive by rats. A pencilled correction (by whom?) has changed ‘Egyptian’ to ...”

“... found expression, were prerequisites of writing serious poems a century later. Eliot’s praise of John Davidson’s ‘Thirty Bob a Week’ as ‘the only poem in which Davidson freed himself completely from the poetic diction of English verse of his time’, so that ‘the poem is to me a great poem for ever’ may seem excessive. When one compares ...”

“... When he refers to Heidegger, he doesn’t mean the philosopher but the operatic impresario John James Heidegger (c.1665-1749). In Literature and Popular Culture in 18th-Century England, as in his Grub Street (1972) and its abridged version Hacks and Dunces (1980), he proposes to describe ‘how things were’ or how they seemed to be to the people who ...”

“... of the Apocalypse reappear in the angel’s dialectical relationship with the storm. But unlike John the Revelator, who was told to ‘seal up those things which the thunders uttered and write them not’, Benjamin wrote down what the thunders said, for in the violence of the storm he seems to have heard the still small voice of Kant, arguing for ...”

“... Browne and Congreve as well as such less remembered figures as the sea captain Robert Knox, and John Chilton, who, Macdonald speculates, was ‘probably’ the author of Voyage to the West Indies … in the year 1560. The penalty for wearing so much learning lightly was, at this midpoint in her career, to be patronised by the more severe and humourless ...”

“... and sees a man who reminds her of the drifter in the doorway of a gas station. They drive to the woods on the edge of town and together sink down to ‘that great dark ocean bed where there were no faces or names but only shadowy bodies you reached out to in order to calm yourself’. When she gets home, the ground beneath her feet is ‘solid and ...”

“... is found dead and blackened in his bed and in due course so is his grandson. Later, I dabbled in John Evelyn’s Sylva. Reprehensibly perhaps, I’ve never paid as much attention to my surroundings on a country walk as I have to descriptions of the natural world in books, all the better in Sylva for its being a guide for stewards and landowners. (You don’t ...”

“... full of demands for it. But it is also most unlikely that the domineering minister of justice, John Vorster, would have left such a key decision to De Wet. Vorster was Van den Bergh’s boss and the two men were close. It seems far more likely that Vorster, probably after discussion with Hendrik Verwoerd, the prime minister, decided it would not be politic ...”

“... a number of illustrious admirers – including those poetic polar opposites, Geoffrey Hill and John Ashbery – his poetry is still not widely known. ‘Soldiers Bathing’, it’s true, is likely to feature in any anthology or critical account of the poetry of the Second World War, and assiduous scholars of both Hill and Ashbery have explored Prince’s ...”

“... menses’, and the nightmare variety act continues until her suicide on Christmas Day 1972, in the woods outside Stella Maris, the Wisconsin psychiatric clinic where she has been a patient for two months. The Kid is vulgar and obnoxious. He calls her ‘Birdtits’, among other insults. He taunts her about her family, her studies in mathematics, her plans to ...”

“... communicable diseases and to read the warning signs of impending distress. In a paper from 1976, John Rivers of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine described the shift from severe poverty to famine as like freezing water turning to ice: it’s not just a lower temperature, but a change in state. During the early stages of a food crisis, the ...”

“... having to touch hers. Likewise with the different concurrence between Mailer and the psychiatrist Woods, on Gilmore and high risk: ‘Gilmore had been keeping in touch with something indispensable to be in touch with.’ It is a question of Mailer’s being in touch with all these people who are not he, and not of his doling himself out through the ...”