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“... No one is fooled by the formula, ‘I’m just looking.’ In Updike’s world there is always a price to be paid. Like the nameless speaker of Browning’s ‘Pictor Ignotus’, Updike knows that perfection can never be perfect, that there is a question which must be answered: ‘Tastes sweet the water with such specks of earth?’ In Of the Farm, for ...”

“... of Hertford, c.1784, a plain, stuccoed, three-storey affair, nine bays wide. Remodelled for Sir Richard Wallace (of the Wallace Collection), natural son of the 4th Marquess, 1872-73, probably by Thomas B. Ambler and again in 1906-7 by Fryers and Penman for K.M. Clark. What remains on the site is a 1920s red brick servants’ wing and to the W, the former ...”

“... francs by the Louvre in the sale of 1852 which followed the Marshal’s death – then the highest price that had ever been paid for a painting. The exhibition Manet/Velázquez: The French Taste for Spanish Painting, which opened last year in the Musée d’Orsay in Paris and went on to the Metropolitan Museum, New York, gave us a sample of the masterpieces in ...”

“... and the panicked selling of securities caused prices to collapse. Between 20 and 30 July, the price of shares in major businesses fell dramatically: Canadian Pacific Railway and Rio Tinto Copper dropped 15 and 24 per cent respectively. With everyone looking to sell, and almost no one to buy, the market in securities evaporated. On Sunday, 26 July, the ...”

“... in the fateful force of speaking. So the point of prophecy is not to give you tip-offs about share-price fluctuations but to be able after the event to affirm that they were foreseen. Prophecy throws out a lasso of utterances in which the predicted event is merely the occasion or waystation that allows the speech act to be drawn back in on itself: I tell you ...”

“... admitted. Her participation was a huge prize for Thein Sein and his regime, an endorsement without price; and some of her most loyal supporters thought it was premature. ‘When Daw Aung San Suu Kyi goes into parliament … the world will think that there’s democracy in Burma,’ the veteran NLD member Win Tin, a political prisoner for 19 years, said in ...”

“... When​ Richard Wright sailed to France in 1946, he was 38 years old and already a legend. He was America’s most famous black writer, the author of two books hailed as classics the moment they were published: the 1940 novel Native Son and the 1945 memoir Black Boy. By ‘choosing exile’, as he put it, he hoped both to free himself from American racism and to put an ocean between himself and the Communist Party of the United States, in which he’d first come to prominence as a writer of proletarian fiction only to find himself accused of subversive, Trotskyist tendencies ...”

“... the aggressor whenever there was any prospect that Iran might win the war. We are now paying the price of containing Khomeini; and Iran’s ‘impossibilist’ demand that Saddam Hussein be destroyed is echoed in many American political speeches. In Britain, the Observer, which had famously denounced the ‘crookedness’ of Anthony Eden just as our men were ...”

“... million people in Britain buying a new novel every week or two’, and points out that for the price currently charged by British publishers for new hardback fiction, a family could rent a video recorder for a month. This is true: but it’s hard to argue that the novel as a form has any inherent edge over film or television, say, when plot and ...”

“... ruled by what was usually the least abusive type of occupation regime, a military government. As Richard Cobb has told us, the governor, General von Falkenhausen, was happy enough in Brussels to return there in 1952 to marry his Belgian mistress. Falkenhausen’s assistant, General Reeder, who conducted day-to-day affairs, was a reasonably correct ...”

“... by Goubert, and this is all the more unfortunate in view of the fact that some of the best, like Richard Evans’s prize-winning Death in Hamburg, are not concerned with Britain at all. The literature of cholera is now abundant. Nor has typhoid been completely neglected. On more topical themes there is little in Goubert that will be of help in relation to ...”

“... with clear maps, an increasing rarity in these cost-conscious days, and its remarkably low price makes it almost a loss leader to entice one to buy the subsequent volumes. Yet one is forced to ask whether another book of this kind supplies any great need. Mr Pitt has little to say which is new or which demands the revision of previous judgments on the ...”

“... chosen range. Is it the fear of spreading too widely? Among living writers she does not mention Richard Altick, Raymond Williams or Anthony Smith. Nor does she speculate about newspapers and books, which co-existed easily or sometimes uneasily on W.H. Smith bookstalls, although she has a brief and useful section on periodicals which steadfastly dealt in ...”

“... Parliamentary footwork had ensured that the Bill progressed through its committee stage, but at a price: it would not apply in Scotland (largely because of the opposition of the Secretary of State, Willie Ross), Northern Ireland or the Armed Forces; and the age of consent was fixed at 21. Richard Crossman, who was then ...”

“... justice of the peace, or the mayor of this city? By what authority do you ask me these things?’ Richard (‘Beau’) Nash was at a loss for a ready reply. The ‘King of Bath’, as he liked to be known, was the gamester son of a Swansea bottlemaker, a heavyweight playboy whose abundant assurance, or chutzpah, had qualified him to act as arbiter of elegance ...”