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“... touched with a characteristic Hrabalian oddity: ‘In the little pub overhanging the river, in a corner by the window, I was reading. You were weeping, I too was weeping and the tubby landlady was weeping.’ In the early 1950s, he was a member of an underground literary group run by the poet Jiri Kolar. His poems had now become stories, but he did not ...”

“... savage passes through Tahiti, from Rousseau by way of Banks and the besotted crew of HMS Bounty to Paul Gauguin.And there were much gossiped about passages of dodgy behaviour on home soil. Departing on the voyage to the South Seas, Banks left behind a young lady, Harriet Blosset, so convinced he had made a promise to marry that she spent three years knitting ...”

“... of predators, hustlers, mobsters, clubhouse politicians and tabloid sleaze that festered in a corner of New York City, a vindication of his mentor, the Mafia lawyer Roy Cohn, a figure unknown to the vast majority of enthusiasts who jammed Trump’s rallies and hailed him as the authentic voice of the people.The notion of a Trump literature ...”

“... Church as it would have seemed to contemporaries, who did not know that civil war lay round the corner. Collinson has done for early 17th-century religion what Conrad Russell has done for early 17th-century politics. He leaves the Church in the late 1620s where Russell has left Parliament – a very long way from revolution. The Jacobean Church was a broad ...”

“... of a Chatwin or a Naipaul, let alone fostered a Kipling, a Somerset Maugham, a Hemingway or a Paul Bowles. No one has had a greater yearning or been better qualified to fill this gap than Donald Richie. ‘Almost everything I do, everything that is known about me, is connected to this country,’ he wrote. ‘To be a person so intent upon describing a ...”

“... to learn – and surprised by my ignorance – that the apostle had been buried in this far-flung corner of Tamil Nadu. The cathedral of San Thome, rebuilt in 1893, is a large neo-Gothic structure in wedding-cake white not far from the southern end of Chennai’s Marine Beach. I saw his tomb in the crypt beneath it, and the displayed sliver of his bone, and ...”

“... back their dead – in fishing boats, or rolled up in carpets – rather than let them lie in a corner of a foreign field, however much ‘a body of England’s’ might consecrate and alter its character. But since then, the exact place of death has taken hold of people’s imaginations: wayside shrines spring up, with cards and messages and bouquets and ...”

“... Patience, with hands clasped, looks down on the huddled, robed figure of Grief, shrinking into the corner of the composition. Kauffman’s classical histories, though typically more orthodox in their subject matter, foregrounded male deeds and exchanges but drew the eye elsewhere. Her Hector Upbraiding Paris for His Retreat from Battle (1770) shows the two ...”

“... Executive with David Austin (who would become a lifelong collaborator) and Ridgeley’s brother Paul. Michael was lead vocalist but hadn’t yet found the right style: his attempts at a Jamaican accent fell flat. A fifth member, Andrew Leaver, directed homophobic slurs at James Sullivan, a gay American student friend in whom Michael had confided his ...”

“... Kaminskys might have been among them, had it not been for the efforts of Adolfo’s older brother, Paul, who successfully petitioned the Argentine consul in Paris. In January 1944, they were released. ‘Why us, and why not them?’ Adolfo wondered. In Paris, he bought chemistry books from bouquinistes along the Seine and taught himself to make explosives. But ...”

“... I thought: this is not true, then I realised the enormity. I had been pushed into yet another corner, this time for keeps … The perception that knowing you’re dying makes you feel more alive is an error. I’m less alive. There’s less life to lead. I can’t give 100 per cent attention to anything – part of me is thinking about my health.There ...”

“... us, we have never acquired the adult mind.’ 18 February. Ned Sherrin’s memorial service at St Paul’s, Covent Garden. A friendly service interspersed with songs, some from Sondheim, some from Sherrin and Brahms, but with none of them as tuneful as the hymns. The audience is very responsive, and it’s the only occasion in my experience that the lesson ...”

“... fun in ‘funeral’, to try to replicate the wit and ebullience that’s invariably around the corner in Duke’s jungle.The union of the blues and Chopin is a great moment, Miley leading the ensemble from one musical strain into another as seamlessly as Brancusi carving each subsequent serration on his King of Kings or Ellington swinging Tchaikovsky’s ...”

“... who did not save his life. The end of the book is devoted to hopes for the vaccine and efforts to corner Bill into delivering it, all to no avail. The narrator has been told that the vaccine is no longer effective if the patient has fewer than 200 T-cells; on the last page of the book the narrator has hit 200 and Bill has vanished. (The scandal caused by ...”

“... Balloon glass aloft. ‘He nearly did make it. In fact he just barely may have his own particular corner in the temple of fame. In a brush box? On a shelf? In a nook behind a side, side, side-altar, bearing a rumpled linen cloth, with one electric candle bulb askew? We often prophesied it for one another. In, precisely, January 1932, he achieved a ...”