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“... East End gangster, and in his hot youth Xan was a little bit tasty, too; his first marriage – to Pearl O’Daniel, another East Ender – was a chaos of infidelities and coke-fuelled fistfights. Now, though, Xan is comprehensively reformed. He has undergone a nightmare divorce from Pearl – which means he doesn’t see as ...”

“... secrets.When America entered the war – after the FBI’s failure to anticipate the attack on Pearl Harbor – Roosevelt ordered Hoover to start arresting ‘alien enemies’. Hoover agreed that ‘the loyalty of the entire group is speculative and highly questionable’; for months he’d been preparing a list of names (close to 770 people) to be ...”

“... which ended under Richard Nixon, began under Woodrow Wilson. That Hoover persecuted Martin Luther King is notorious, but Hoover was also the man who drove Marcus Garvey out of America. Similarly, the Hoover who turned his malign attention upon the anti-Vietnam War movement was the same man who had, half a century before, hounded Emma Goldman and John Reed ...”

“... one of my feet or maybe even my neck.’ And there is Ditie, the picaresque hero of I Served the King of England, a waiter in a Prague hotel, who once served the Emperor of Ethiopia, and worked with a head waiter who once served the King of England. Ditie is usually wrong about everything – he marries a German athlete ...”

“... was cleaned in 1973, and study suggested that some original features have almost vanished. A pearl necklace is just a shadow now. The hands are the standard-issue long-fingered type; a black ribbon, added later, may conceal damage to the paint. Margaret – if it is she – wears coral and ermine. She would have been a widow when the portrait was ...”

“... swooned over Cary Grant in An Affair to Remember, and sung and danced with Yul Brynner in The King and I. This is a way of saying she wasn’t the twenty-year-old girl of ‘The Turn of the Screw’, had not lived what James called ‘a small, smothered life’, and was most unlikely not to have seen herself full-length in a mirror before she got to the ...”

“... She was born in 1901, on the island of Büyükada outside Istanbul, surrounded by inlaid mother-of-pearl furniture from Damascus passed on by her uncle, the grand vizier; the house had its own hammam, a large number of servants (including a Sudanese eunuch) and a grotto filled with geraniums and orchids tended by her father, a military officer and ...”

“... on the hillin their white stone; the Castle glows.And the streets are bright blurs of sodiumand pearl: the drawn tracery of headlampssmeared in long exposure. For miles westthe city stretches,laid with vapour trails and ghosts.To the east, the folding sea has drownedthe girning of the gulls. A lighthouseperforates the night: a slow cigarette.Then there is ...”

“... to adorn the walls, and perhaps this is what inspired the college’s then president, Valerie Pearl, to write to a hundred leading woman artists in 1992 asking if they’d be willing to donate works to the college on the condition they’d be kept on permanent display. Three-quarters of them came up with the goods, starting off a collection that now ...”

“... four white police officers were acquitted of using excessive force in the act of arresting Rodney King, a black man, Unsworth won half the Booker Prize – the other half went to Michael Ondaatje for The English Patient – for a novel that in its unsparing portrayal of life aboard an 18th-century slave ship looked back to the colonial and commercial origins ...”

“... also without titles, and probably, according to the experts, by the same poet. Of this group Pearl, an allegory about a man’s grief at the death of his two-year-old daughter, is the most brilliant and mysterious. Written around 1400, the manuscript is usually described as physically unattractive, not in the hand of the author and hard to read. It ...”

“... filled with ‘hangings all of Tyrian tapestry’ and strewn with ‘Turkey cushions boss’d with pearl’: English audiences recognised goods from the ‘Turkish’ east as rare luxuries. Those with access to the homes of the rich and powerful could glimpse the Islamic world via the portraits of the ‘great Turk’ owned by many English gentlemen, or the ...”

“... its functional life as at most five years.’ Another enormous project, which Ferguson relates to King Harald Bluetooth’s claim on the Jellinge runestone to have ‘won all Denmark and Norway and made the Danes Christian’, was the building of the ‘trelleborgs’, half a dozen of them, all with the same pattern of a walled and moated circle divided into ...”

“... while the Goebbels propaganda machine derided Donovan’s ‘Jewish scribblers’.Six months after Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt dissolved the unwieldy COI. A new Office of War Information took over propaganda and everything else went to the new Office of Strategic Services (OSS), run by Donovan. With an unlimited, unaudited budget exempt from congressional ...”

“... and the exercise of absolute power (some days her servants had to put everything into song), the pearl-hung, painted creature perched on gold cushions did achieve a mad grandeur, not unlike that of Ludwig of Bavaria. A recent search of London’s best jazz shops produced just one track by the celebrated Thirties torch-singer Libby Holman: ‘Am I ...”