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“... their friends, to say that someone ‘sat there like Queen Mary’ was to indicate that a terminal blight had been cast over the occasion. James Pope-Hennessy, born in 1916, belonged to that generation. He came from a distinguished Catholic and literary family and was a friend of many of his most interesting ...”

“... he wrote. In his autobiography he revealed – a notorious insight into his practice that was to blight his reputation until it rebloomed during the Second World War – that early each morning he placed his watch before him and wrote 250 words every quarter-hour toward his weekly quota, which averaged 40 pages. He reckoned up his wordage as matter-of-factly ...”

“... been created Duke of Leinster – had no intention of allowing the misdeeds of one of the clan to blight their prospects in the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy. Lord Edward paid on both counts for being an aristocrat. Later chroniclers of his socially humbler colleagues in the rebellion preferred to think him romantic and impractical compared to them; while his ...”

“... the arrival of industrialisation – silk mills, railways, lake steamers, telegraph poles – to blight the Northern Italian landscape. Closer to home, at that moment the stench from the polluted Thames was forcing the Houses of Parliament to sit with canvas over their windows wet with chloride of lime. Father and son compared notes on the impact of ...”

“... further south in Stranmillis. In Belfast the urban motorway – something that has done much to blight city life across the United Kingdom – has a sinister, though not altogether unhappy significance. As Dominic Bryan argues in his lively essay in Belfast 400, the M2 and the Westlink have served as a bleak cordon sanitaire between some of the rival ...”

“... Peacock began in the examiner’s office in 1819, working under the Scots economist James Mill and alongside John Stuart Mill (who had been brought into the company by his father in 1823) on a starting salary of £600, which rose with various promotions. It reached £2000 when Peacock succeeded James Mill as ...”

“... they swung it open and found inside boxes of Agricultural Department leaflets on wheat and potato blight, framed portraits of Mounties on horses, hockey sticks and, in one corner, the holy grail of Canadian identity itself, a life-sized birch-bark canoe. O Canada, our home and native land, True patriot’s love in all thy sons command. Canadians are great ...”

“... The camps aren’t trashy. If only. Rather they occasion inoffence on a dispiriting scale. They blight the plain, which is further defaced by vandals in uniform who treat it as a playground and scrapyard: danger areas and their alarmist signs; unexploded ordnance; live firing (260,000 rounds per annum); burned-out tanks, like an installation by a ...”

“... temperate and tropical, man-made and natural. ‘A complex of few interweavings’ is Henry James’s curtly paradoxical summary of the Florida scene. Heavy, stagnant air and violent hurricanes. Paradisiac contentment and accesses of sudden panic. The strange recumbent crescent moons. The deep shadows in the daytime. The snuffling or crisping animal ...”

“... into magus and sage, he begins to wonder if his grandiose heresies have not called down a blight on the whole Jewish race. How else explain the pogroms at his door and the forced eviction of his shopkeeping relatives? For a time he takes to drink and then to roaming the woods, living off mushrooms and birds’ eggs and for ever intoning Pantheist ...”

“... reason that many people who actually knew him, including someone with so good a judgment as Henry James, found him utterly charming. The charm, if one thinks of it, must have lain in a kind of innocence, the insouciance of a born talker. He may have been all the bad things I have called him, but unaffectedly so and without calculation; if he was ...”

“... writing had become a habit quite lacking in relish, intensity or surprise. This strange American blight may, in both cases, be a deliberate effect: but if so, it is a dangerous tactic to adopt in a book of recollection. The reader is more easily seduced by the writer for whom the distance of the past lends enchantment, or at least the appearance of it. With ...”

“... wife Eleanor Balfour founded Newnham College. In 1896, he joined his brothers-in-law, along with James Bryce, G.K. Chesterton, R.B. Haldane and Sir Oliver Lodge in founding the Synthetic Society, which, in an age of waning faith, set out to contribute towards a working philosophy of religious belief. A decade earlier, several of the same cast had joined ...”

“... his terms. One notes with despair the presence in Lloyd George’s camp of the News Chronicle’s James Horrabin and Hore-Belisha, the most prominent Jewish politician of his day. One notes, rather more suspiciously, that this initiative was timed to coincide exactly with Hess’s similar bid for a separate peace. A separate peace of any kind would have ...”

“... have recently provided the material for works by artists as different from each other as P.D. James, DV8 Physical Dance Theatre and David Lynch. Stephen Egger, an American academic and former policeman who wrote the first doctoral dissertation on the phenomenon, gives a definition/description of serial murder in Serial Murder: An Elusive Phenomenon: A ...”