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“... already the author of his major works. The Foundation nonetheless took a big punt on the genius of Richard Powers, who was awarded his MacArthur in 1989, aged only 32. I haven’t checked, but he is probably the youngest novelist ever to win a fellowship. Generally unknown in 1989, and temperamentally reticent, he has lately divulged something of his personal ...”

“... near the corner of 135th Street and Seventh Avenue. He had recently been fired as fourth cook on a Boston-to-Washington dining car, and had yet to learn to want anything more than a good time. On any morning that summer, Little might have brushed shoulders with the slender, watchful Ralph Ellison, passing through the Harlem YMCA, where Little roomed for a time ...”

“... But they also worked closely with governments in Asia, Africa and Latin America. In Puerto Rico, Richard Bolin of Arthur D. Little advised the US colonial administration and was involved in setting up a factory enclave subject to minimal regulations in 1947 – he called it Operation Bootstrap. The enclave became a model for export processing zones, or free ...”

“... this immortal ‘me’. Discussing a study of 1883 entitled Walt Whitman and written by his friend Richard Bucke, he insists to Traubel that his endorsement of the book was never meant to extend to its interpretations: as to his explication – no, no, no – that I do not accept – for Leaves of Grass baffles me, its author, at all points of its meaning ...”

“... flew into the World Trade Center: if they wish ‘to carry out a bioweapons attack in the US’, Richard Ebright, a microbiologist at Rutgers has said, ‘their simplest means of acquiring access to the materials and the knowledge would be to send individuals to train within programmes involved in biodefence research.’ Background checks are carried out on ...”

“... with Amsterdam and Paris, seems to have been one of the most fertile sources of erotica. A ‘Boston’ imprint might really mean Stuttgart, and a ‘Mexico City’ imprint might have been applied in Cleveland, Ohio. For sheer cheekiness, however, a prize might be claimed by several early editions of the Comte de Mirabeau’s Errotika Biblion ...”

“... as an ordinary hand. The agreement before he left London was that he should report to Bellomont at Boston on his return. One year’s piracy, with only two or three prizes and little in the way of bloodshed – nothing remotely to compare with Morgan’s – seems a strange basis for such a lasting reputation. But the reputation was founded on the enormous ...”

“... were channelled. Where else does an argument about illegality and injustice go? When in 1869 the Boston lawyer Richard Dana added a postscript to his celebrated narrative Two Years before the Mast, reflecting on the brutality which he had witnessed a quarter of a century earlier as a boy at sea, he was quick to insist that ...”

“... on the bronze plaque on the stern, but only by tilting your head can you make out the faded ‘RICHARD’ below.I now know a good deal about the Bonhomme Richard. I know that it was originally a French merchant vessel called the Duc de Duras; that it was loaned to the fledgling US navy; and that it took part in the War ...”

“... her first story collection in 1905. ‘A Wagner Matinee’ is about a former teacher at the Boston Conservatory who, after making a foolish marriage, spends thirty years as a frontier wife in Nebraska. Returning to Boston, she hears a matinee concert and realises that she has wasted her life. Asked by a correspondent ...”

“... Shakespearean actor Edwin Forrest (1806-72), a man described by his admiring modern biographer Richard Moody as ‘the first actor who refused to subscribe to the nation’s cultural inferiority complex’. As The Shakespeare Riots makes clear, however, Forrest was sufficiently affected by this inferiority complex to have spent much of his life telling the ...”

“... scholars and popular writers for concentrating on the mainly Catholic ethnic enclaves of New York, Boston, Philadelphia and Chicago and ignoring everywhere else. In The Irish Diaspora in America (1976), Lawrence McCaffrey described the Irish as ‘pioneers of the American ghetto’ and Byron believes that this has become the stereotype for all Irish ...”

“... on the South Side from James Farrell’s trilogy; the block of South Drexel where Bigger Thomas in Richard Wright’s Native Son killed and incinerated his rich employer’s daughter; Nelson Algren’s Division Street; the train station where Louis Armstrong was met by King Oliver’; and the Panther Room of the Sherman Hotel, which was a notable touring venue ...”

“... merely of order, but of an expressive energy which makes order and freedom itself worth having? Richard Sennett believes that it is. As he has explained in what he has written about Chicago and about the bewildered self-contempt of blue-collar workers in Boston in the late 1960s, and as he has most elaborately argued in ...”

“... San Francisco. Learn to whistle at five’ – before moving on to bigger things: ‘“North of Boston”. Address Great Poetry Meal. Decline. Later works. Doesn’t seem to die. Attempt to write “Crossing the Bar”. International copyright. Chief occupation (according to Who’s Who) pursuit of glory; most noticeable trait, patience in the pursuit of ...”