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“... Certainly he fell, received a visit from the dead monk and recovered, but as Elizabeth King and David Todd detail, the supposed origin of the machine is supported more by circumstantial evidence than positive proof; it’s an ‘elegant hypothesis’, the authors conclude. More interesting than the clockwork Diego’s uncertain provenance, however, is the ...”

“... Eternity (1953), and then, after Edward Dmytryk’s Raintree County (1957), eight late films from Vincent Donehue’s Lonelyhearts (1958) to Raoul Lévy’s The Defector (1966), the caesura provided by the spectacular car crash that wrecked his face. There are three kinds of classic American crash: the James Dean, Eddie Cochran legend-sealer; the Bob Dylan at ...”

“... right words, I will never know, because he knows what I do not, how to keep things to himself. David Sedaris had invited me to read alongside him that night at UCLA, but before that we had the whole day. We took a cab first to Venice Beach, so that Jason could pay homage to Arnold Schwarzenegger. ‘Remember when he says that he feels the pump and it’s ...”

“... safely (if painfully and disastrously) in the mind. No director realises this more clearly than David Cronenberg. He is best known no doubt for The Fly (1986), Dead Ringers (1988) and his much vilified Crash (1996), but some of us have a soft spot, if that’s the term, for his early work The Brood (1979), a classic instance of the acting-out theory. A ...”

“... that property was a crime, but sponging and bad landlordship were not. G.M. Trevelyan had a David and Saul relationship of some intensity with his brother Charles, the wenching socialist baronet, who suffered from depression and aristocratic bad temper and wilfulness. If anything could have cured him of progressivism, it would have been the sight of his ...”

“... patient is Jung’s, a disturbed woman not at all underplayed by Keira Knightley. The movie – David Cronenberg’s A Dangerous Method, with a screenplay by Christopher Hampton – opens with a view of her struggling against her captors in a horse-drawn coach (the date is 1904) and being delivered to a posh sanatorium in Switzerland. She goes rigid when ...”

“... shuffle away from the vapid tax-and-spend policies they had drifted into. Their new spokesmen – Vincent Cable, David Laws and Mark Oaten – are the first prominent Liberals since Jo Grimond who could seriously claim to be heirs of the Grand Old Man. Political commentators point out that parties make such shifts because ...”

“... attitude in general and his mother in particular. It is no accident that, as Taylor quotes John Vincent saying, Margaret Thatcher was ‘the point at which all snobberies meet’, for she represented the compacted prejudices of the nation. The dislike she aroused was couched in terms of condescension that had nothing to do with policy. Mary Warnock objected ...”

“... directly influenced the literature that emerged from their homes, whether the playful poetry of Vincent Voiture, the tart maxims of La Rochefoucauld, or Diderot’s philosophical speculations. Beyond making these points, Craveri has an eye for some delightful stories. A nine-year-old Mlle Montmorency was chided by her tutor, Mme de Richelieu, for a small ...”

“... 2007 book, Regret the Error, Craig Silverman says Ross was humiliated after a profile of Edna St Vincent Millay implied the poet’s father might be dead and said ‘her mother appears to remember little of her own biography.’ Millay’s mother wrote a letter: ‘both of these parents,’ she said, ‘are living, and in full possession of their ...”

“... square and began to hawk their merchandise. Their tobacco, a Euro-American blend called Saint-Vincent, could not in theory compare to the Chesapeake leaf offered by the General Farm – although, as Kwass points out, Farm agents themselves often adulterated their product with wood shavings, ashes, pulverised brick or even plain dirt. But Mandrin was ...”

“... no such thing, and it is still hard to work out the rationale, even when you look for it in David Fraser Jenkins and Hugh Fowler-Wright’s The Art of John Piper, a nearly exhaustive survey of his career in all its phases. Fraser Jenkins, who curated the Tate’s 1983 retrospective on the occasion of Piper’s 80th birthday, knows the career well, and ...”

“... idealists. What do these ancient arguments have to do with the world of Ruling Performance, with David Pannick’s reflections on the English judiciary, or with Vernon Bogdanor’s Encyclopedia of Political Institutions? For one thing, they cast light on the hopes and fears most of us entertain in the face of government activity of all sorts. Realists who ...”

“... but of Protestants, Freemasons and Jews. Le Pèlerin, edited by the Assumptionist priest Vincent de Paul Bailly, regularly printed caricatures of Jews and accounts of Jewish ritual murder of Christians. The Assumptionists helped lead the campaign against Drefyus, strongly supported the anti-Semitic, monarchist Action Française, and in 1898 even ...”

“... and rather badly’; that Joe Orton ‘aspired to corrupt an audience with pleasure’; and that Vincent Massey ‘could stroke even a cliché until it purred like an epigram’. Lord Annan notes that E.M. Forster’s works ‘were full of aphorisms’, something on which he is rather an authority himself. Sir John Hicks sums up the issues between Keynes and ...”