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“... society whichever government we live under. 20 February, Yorkshire. Via Mallerstang to Kirkby Stephen and Barnard Castle, the tops still veined with snow and in the late afternoon bathed in a rich tawny light, the valleys in shadow with the hills still catching the sun. We have tea at Muker, where we look in the church which is dull and scraped, how dull ...”

“... of the images d’Epinal – the Black Madonna of Czestochowa, Wenceslas Square, the Crown of St Stephen; the liberator Pope, the philosopher President, the Nobel electrician – with which the media could uplift audiences in the West. Kadare might be a better writer than Havel, but apart from a few readers in France, who cared? No Montenegrin estate lay ...”

“... a poet be a novelist? Why not?’ Then, in late 1962, after she’d torn the phoneline out of the wall during an argument with her husband, Ted Hughes, and he had left her and their two infant children in Devon, there were only letters. ‘I am fine,’ she wrote to her mother in America. ‘Just need a settled nanny & to rest & write & letters. I love & live ...”

“... into a ship. All the walls were painted grey, battleship grey. Everything was grey except the wall where my books are and the bathroom, which was red, a dusty red.’ The Kendalls avoided the alienation from the familiar rhythms of the city experienced by other East Enders who moved out to suburban council estates. ‘You knew everybody anyway because ...”

“... variation in Brahms’s Handel set and sings these words to its subject: ‘There was a bee/Upon a wall,/and it said buzz and that was all;/And it said buzz and that was all.’ As Forster cheerfully remarks, Proust, who made so much of his own little ear-worm, would have winced at this. My irritation is worsened by my inability to make the words fit the ...”

“... was just RBS, whose arrangements weren’t especially baroque by the standards of the City and Wall Street. RBS had no involvement in the Structured Investment Vehicles – SIVs – whose main purpose is to keep things off the balance sheet. SIVs involved borrowing short in order to lend long, the same dazzlingly successful financial model that underpinned ...”

“... Nida, and their daughter, Keziah. He opened the front door and was immediately pushed back by a wall of black smoke. He went to the window and shouted: ‘Help! I’ve got a baby in here!’ From the ground below, 14 storeys down, people were yelling and yelling: he should stay where he was, the fire rescue people were on their way up. But from the window ...”

“... on the part of member states, has enormous implications for the Convention. Matters are much as Stephen Sedley predicted in 1997, when he argued that unless it is seen as a ‘living thing, adopted by civilised countries for a humanitarian end, constant in motive but mutable in form, the Convention will eventually become an anachronism’. Perhaps it became ...”