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“... the aristocratic Calthorpe Estate, which was still tending it carefully as late as the 1960s, when John Madin was commissioned to design by far the best modernist housing in the city for the area. Other social improvement plans have grown out of it: Edgbaston adjoins Aston Webb’s overripe Victorian university buildings, and is close to the rangier, folksier ...”

“... an ‘example of unfair burden sharing’ and ‘using a hatchet when you need a scalpel’ when John McCain proposed it during the campaign of 2008. In the same speech, Obama embraced the false analogy between federal budgets and household budgets, overlooking (for starters) the government’s control of taxation and the money supply. ‘Families across the ...”

“... the gym for no good reason or an effeminate classmate or two. I’d looked through books like John Rechy’s City of Night that my brother had lying around. It was mostly about low-life, pathetic guys jerking each other off in Times Square movie houses, near as I could tell. If my brother was queer, I thought, there was no doubt a lot more to it than ...”

“... whom he confesses ‘a strange liking’ – his most influential model, or imaginative icon, is John Bunyan, whose life and work obsess him. Bunyan is ‘this dreamer and penman’, ‘the most prominent man of letters as far as English literature is concerned’, who had ‘the tinker’s power of reaching the heart’ – there is a hint of rural ...”

“... Guiana who could shave himself as well as roll and light cigarettes using only his mouth. Pete Robinson was a 65-pound ‘human skeleton’. Olga Roderick … was a traditional bearded lady, and Koo Koo (‘the bird girl from Mars’) appeared to be the victim of progeria, a rare disease that causes rapid and premature ageing.As Browning assembled his ...”

“... building, a 16th-century revision of the 13th-century church founded by the Knights of St John. The Hole is a statement and it is properly capitalised. The labourers, a self-confessed art collective, work the Hole by hand, with pick and shovel, turn and turn about: four days to complete a grave shaft, without any of the tortured grinding and ...”

“... one Sinatra’s name was often linked with. Consider the following, from Cosa Nostra (2004), John Dickie’s history of the Sicilian Mafia: ‘Anyone who was worthy of being described as mafioso therefore had a certain something, an attribute called “mafia”. “Cool” is about the closest modern English equivalent.’ Discourse among ‘men of ...”

“... something boys and girls can read in bed at night along with the adventures of the Swiss Family Robinson. But dead she had something more to offer than amusement for ages 10-15; dead she had written, without meaning to or trying to, a book with the force of a masterpiece to make people finally see. One crucial realisation would be just how trivial the Frank ...”

“... and the peek-a-boo portrait of himself! How cunning of Harvard to market the Arcades as another John Grisham or The Jewel in the Crown.) I do not recommend my reading tactic to others. This is a book for moving about in, lightly and irresponsibly and, above all, fast. Benjamin seems to have dreamed of a final, rapid-fire, cinematic delivery, accelerating to ...”

“... he was made a Saoi and the honour, symbolised by a collar of gold, was conferred on him by Mary Robinson, who spoke about his ‘awkward’ presence in Irish literary life. I am a member of Aosdána and I was among those who voted for him. In October 1997 Channel Four made a programme about Irish anti-semitism in which Stuart was interviewed. He told the ...”

“... three acknowledged illegitimate children. ‘I wonder what Lady Wilde thought of her husband?’ John Butler Yeats wrote to his son in 1921. ‘When she was Miss Elgee, Mrs Butt found her with her husband when her circumstances were not doubtful, and told my mother about it – so that she could afford to be wise and tolerant.’ (Mrs Butt’s husband was ...”

“... emerged of an undeclared £373,000 loan Mandelson had taken from the Treasury minister Geoffrey Robinson to buy a house in Notting Hill, an untenable conflict of interest. Mandelson quit, and after a sojourn on Corfu with his ‘old and good friends’ from the Rothschild banking family, passed into his personal Golgotha: a small flat, a Fiat Punto instead ...”

“... X when he ghosted his autobiography? To what extent did Ted Sorensen create the verbal manner of John F. Kennedy when he wrote Profiles in Courage, a book for which the future president won the Pulitzer Prize? And are the science fiction stories H.P. Lovecraft ghosted for Harry Houdini not the best things he ever wrote? There would be a touch of all this in ...”