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“... suffocating interior for the sacred cause of Idiom’; or standing ‘lost in meditation before a white congregation of swans assembled on the lake, looking himself in his old cloak like a huge umbrella left behind by some picnic party’. Yet Coole was a centre of Irish writing when such a centre was needed. Most authors were glad to be invited there, though ...”

“... tremendously. David West quite rightly begins the introduction to his translation of the Odes with Patrick Leigh Fermor’s wonderful story, in A Time of Gifts, of himself and General Kreipe reciting the Soracte ode while gazing up at Mount Ida, during the general’s removal from Crete after his capture. Kreipe’s eventual ‘ach so, Herr ...”

“... sort of plot and the two men were buried alongside each other and their graves marked by plain white marble slabs bearing just their names and dates. Family photographs show both graves strewn with wreaths and flowers and Alfred’s headstone has an ornate wire frame fixed behind it, covered with more flowers. Amelia and Albert were the only mourners at ...”

“... dictator, and blame him for Zimbabwe’s descent into hyperinflation and poverty. The seizure of white-owned farms by his black supporters has been depicted as a form of thuggery, and as a cause of the country’s declining production, as if these lands were doomed by black ownership. Sanctions have been imposed, and opposition groups funded with the ...”

“... In 1987, BT’s phone box monopoly ended. So began the conversion memorably described by Patrick Wright in A Journey through Ruins (1991), of the only remaining ‘public’ element of a now otherwise privately owned service into a (privately owned) heritage industry. Boxes began to come in different shapes and sizes. Respectable neighbourhoods could ...”

“... priest of Irish poetry: ‘a sentimentalist gone sour’.Among McGahern’s circle was the painter Patrick Swift, who in 1960 was in London, co-editing a magazine called X. The following year Swift published an extract from McGahern’s unpublished first novel. It was spotted by Charles Monteith at Faber, who went on to oversee the publication of many of ...”

“... movement, favouring medieval typefaces, elaborate woodcut illustrations, uncut pages and plenty of white space. An equivalent international vogue for ‘ephemeral bibelots’ was inspired by the Montmartre-based Chat noir. In America, slim productions with names like the Fad, Impressions, A Little Spasm and Whims promoted a Wildean cult of decadence, and were ...”

“... Many Democrats remain convinced that Nader’s presidential campaign in 2000 cost Al Gore the White House and ushered in the calamitous reign of George W. Bush. The obsession with Nader is at first puzzling: blame for Bush’s ascendancy can be traced to many other sources. Gore’s campaign was timid and bungling, but in any case he won the election and ...”

“... page later with the momentary glimpse, as Thatcher leans forward, of ‘the Arctic gleam of a very white bra’. Jilly Cooper has an eye for Thatcher’s likeable side and for her disciplined self-denial and she doesn’t let either quite win out. These 1970s Sunday Times columns, based increasingly on her own rollicking domestic life by Putney Common, are ...”

“... were doctors trying to cure him.)This, coupled with Clinton’s ostentatious membership of an all-white golf-club, strikes me as a more pressing issue of morals and ‘character’ than l’affaire Flowers. But Clinton, who at first looks as if he welcomes a change of subject, doesn’t care for this one. He turns his back and marches away. Later on ...”

“... as to be almost parodically fashionable, the perfect type of those Euro-best-sellers such as Patrick Susskind’s Perfume and Umberto Eco’s Name of the Rose that seem, to some British critics, to spring from an EEC conspiracy to thwart exports of genuine, wholesome, straightforward British fiction the same way French farmers block the entry of English ...”

“... with irrepressible Mitford brio. There’s a high-spirited acknowledgment of help received from Patrick Leigh-Fermor (easily the best of her correspondents) in removing from her MS such campus jargon as ‘on-going’, ‘explicate’ and ‘comedic scenarios’. I only wish he had cut out ‘long-remembered’ and ‘sadly missed’. What’s odd is how ...”

“... that go astray or are misunderstood. But for all this, Kate never ceases to be a 57-year-old white North Carolina woman, with all her limitations and prejudices, her nostalgia for a pre-consumerist America and her well-meaning but patronising attitude to blacks. In the last fifty pages, which briefly recount Kate’s adult life, the language turns blowsy ...”

“... different, of course, on the other side of the theoretical divide. In his comments on the Budget, Patrick Minford, the most determined monetarist around, argues that the Government’s financial and monetary policy is absolutely right. Yet in justifying these comments, and in his discussion of the nature of unemployment, Minford leads us onto the more ...”

“... communication between the two sides with their own spin. By a delectable irony, it took a few white lies and one massive deception to forge trust between the British government and the Provisional leadership. Duddy was primarily responsible for the message of February 1993, purportedly from Martin McGuinness: ‘The conflict is over but we need your ...”