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“... his wife into a parent – strict but merciful, the custodian of his best self. Since Clark’s death last year, his widow has paid tribute to his sensitive prowess as an adulterer. He caused her much pain, she has confessed, but never quite too much. Bully for him, then, so to speak. In his introduction to the first volume of his Diaries, Clark claimed ...”

“... would call it a roll of honour. From recent years, it would include Clive Ponting, Cathy Massiter, Sarah Tisdall and Katharine Gun. Norton-Taylor seems to have known them all. Most of his best stories, however, came from the numerous civil servants, some of them very senior, who used a discreet journalist to reveal that government was up to something morally ...”

“... who starred in Hollywood’s first feature-length partial-talkie – the movie which sounded the death knell for silent cinema – is himself a historical monument ‘condensing into a single figure the structures of white supremacist racial integration that built the United States: black labour in the realm of production, inter-racial nurture and sex (the ...”

“... the centrality of Osborne’s influence on the generations that followed. Following Osborne’s death in 1994, however, David Hare, among others, leaped to the playwright’s defence, in his memorial eulogy and a longer lecture first delivered in 2002 and repeated on the stage of the Royal Court on the 50th anniversary of Look Back in Anger’s opening. Now ...”

“... The hat, however, suggests to the adult Aurora, by now a poet with an interest in tragedy, the death of Aeschylus, who according to legend was killed when a circling eagle or vulture, mistaking his bald pate for a rock, dropped a tortoise on it from a great height in order to crack open its shell. Perhaps the beginnings of this thought had struck the young ...”

“... ill on arrival that ‘the Captain had fears of her dropping off his hands, without Emolument by death.’ Susanna Wheatley had recently lost a daughter of around Phillis’s age; there’s some speculation that she imagined the child as a replacement.In an essay of 1983, Alice Walker writes of her grief for ‘this sickly, frail Black girl’ whose ...”

“... bang in the middle of Lichfield, in September 1709, the elder son of Michael Johnson and his wife, Sarah, rather old and very proud parents. They had, Johnson recalled, ‘not much happiness from each other’, and immediately deposited their ambitions in him. Michael, the son of a labourer, had had the rare good luck to receive a charity school education and ...”

“... A few months before his early death from tuberculosis, John Keats scribbled these lines in his papers: This living hand, now warm and capable Of earnest grasping, would, if it were cold And in the icy silence of the tomb, So haunt thy days and chill thy dreaming nights That thou would wish thine own heart dry of blood So in my veins red life might stream again, And thou be conscience-calm’d – see, here it is I hold it towards you ...”

“... France, a different and far more festive popular cult sprang up around the figure of her companion Sarah, who is portrayed as a magical Black Virgin; she is the patron saint of the Gitans, or Gypsies, of this area and beyond.Mary Magdalene’s posthumous fame centred on her relics, which were as multiple as her jostling identities. Relics lend specificity and ...”

“... whether Kennedy would drop Johnson from the ticket the following year, which would have been the death of his political ambitions. Kennedy always denied it and there is no evidence that he ever discussed the possibility with his advisers. But as Caro points out, this hardly settles the matter. Kennedy had shown himself Johnson’s equal in ruthlessness and ...”

“... at the way one word, phrase, action or body can turn into another, often at a terrible price. The death of Iphigenia becomes the death of Agamemnon. More broadly, in one of the Chorus’s most powerful images, Ares, the war god, is presented as a money changer who ‘trades men into jars’ filled with ash. The living ...”

“... made it so attractive to government that it became virtually unrepealable despite this explicit death wish. The problem posed by the cessation of hostilities with Germany and Japan in 1945 was met by a timely emphasis on the newly arrived Cold War ‘emergency’, and there matters stood in the decades that followed, with one bout of paranoia after another ...”

“... you do well to forget your own advice. 2. Last April I began to write an account of the life and death of Rosemary Nelson, a 40-year-old solicitor in the town of Lurgan in County Armagh. At 12.40 p.m. on 15 March she got into her car outside her house at 5 Ashgrove Grange. As she drove away a bomb went off in the car. She lost both legs and suffered fatal ...”

“... Screeched and pranced around the Rotunda like an inebriated baby goat? Beaten a policeman to death? I could be wrong, but I don’t think so. Imagining something and doing it are two different things – or so I, like Caliban, would like to believe. Thought is free.Of course, Highsmith was unsurpassed at depicting such destructive self-abandon, above ...”

“... I sat at the bar with Douglas Gordon while he drew me pictures of devils (I have them somewhere). Sarah Lucas and I walked the streets in search of more drink after Damien Hirst told Will Self to ‘crack a fucking smile’. I think I sang with Milli Vanilli. Life coaches will tell you that nothing interesting happens after three o’clock in the ...”