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“... in folkloric representations of Polish culture: ‘The leader of the dance was tapping his foot and singing in a low voice with a Russian accent: I’m from Krakow, yes, I am!’ The Russian is marked out everywhere in the book, and identified with power and scale. There is (the unnamed) Brezhnev with his ‘Kalmuck face’, ‘the tsar of ...”

“... the ideas of ‘torture’, ‘prison’ and being ‘sentenced to death’. He stands at the foot of the stairs to his bedroom and thinks that ‘each step would have been more cruel for me to climb only if it had led to the guillotine.’Fortunately, the family farce is continuing in the garden, and the narrator’s ‘delight’ in it stems his anguish ...”

“... to the cementerio laico because it was in the danger zone) gang members parade on top of the six-foot-high wall at funerals chanting vengeance. Clutching three cell-phones, a young woman in black is tending the fresh grave of her husband; incised into the stone is his photograph and the red badge of Ciudad de Cali, the football club he supported. He was ...”

“... missionary in Xinjiang, is in the Taklamakan Desert to the north of Khotan, accessible only by foot, camel or horse-drawn cart. The tombs of Imam Asim and his son are at the highest point on the desert track. They are constructed from mounds of sand, protected by wooden fences and a wall of mud and clay, and marked with prayer flags remarkably similar in ...”

“... of revisionist historians to rehabilitate the myth of Camelot on the Potomac. Almost, but not yet. Michael Beschloss’s absorbing and authoritative study of US-Soviet relations from January 1961 until Kennedy’s assassination in November 1963 adds significantly to the case amassed by the demolition squad. Like many US authors, Beschloss assumes that his ...”

“... border with California, where restaurants and shops and stately wooden houses sit at the foot of a forested mountain range called the Siskiyous. It has twenty thousand residents but swells during the academic year with students and in warmer months with tourists, many of them here for the summer-long Oregon Shakespeare Festival. There are ...”

“... of the desk-bound and lionised, and J.M. Coetzee too showed signs of becoming a chronic case. Now Michael Chabon has produced Moonglow, supposedly based on conversations from 1989 between a writer called Michael Chabon and his dying grandfather, an engineer for whom space travel in general and rockets in particular were an ...”

“... the dream of paranoia, and look after them. So Lucan is signing off. There was another letter, to Michael Stoop, who had lent him the car, which said: ‘I have had a traumatic night of unbelievable coincidence. However I won’t bore you with anything.’ This was the only evidence of the ‘intruder’ that the family and Ms Moore cling to. Lucan, as we ...”

“... Tanna, and one day I will leave you and return. I am coming back to that rock, and when I put my foot on it, mature kava roots will spring from the ground, the old men will become young again, and there will be no more sickness or death.’ His audience applauded the story, but Baylis soon realised that no one in the crowd had heard it before. As the weeks ...”

“... compressed three vertebrae but never lost consciousness. My English professor and mentor, the poet Michael Heffernan, was first down the stairs and out the door to where I had landed. I must have appeared somewhat dazed and breathless. ‘Did you hit your head?’ he kept asking once he had determined I was alive. ‘What day is it?’ ‘Who is the President ...”

“... root of her problem with men. The only affair she writes about is her affair with a man called Michael. She loves Michael for ‘two short years’ while at university, until her eyes are rudely opened to his shortcomings when she gets pregnant and decides to have an abortion. Given the way Frieda describes ...”

“... lean into the picture or out of it, and the projection towards us of an elbow or the sole of a foot accelerates the compositional rhythms and encourages communion between the figures – and with us. Correggio was capable of far more daring foreshortening – notably in the aerobatic angels and gesticulating apostles on the domes of S. Giovanni Evangelista ...”

“... story: When Did We Go to Morocco? or It Can’t Be True or Haven’t We Met? Of It Can’t Be True Michael Auping says: ‘It is echo-like in its composition. It is composed of a series of tilting frames jostling each other for position within the whole. The eye is teased back to a bright yellow frame in the centre of the painting and stopped short by a series ...”

“... bodies. Beit Sahour is a smaller town on the edge of Bethlehem. Angles are important here too, as Michael Awwad, a well-to-do Palestinian shopkeeper, explains with a diagram drawn on the counter of his hardware shop. In July 1988, he begins, Edmon Ghanem, a 17-year-old Palestinian, was walking by a house in Beit Sahour when a large stone fell from the balcony ...”

“... was first published, in Paris, in ‘the early Thirties’, according to its English translator, Michael Henry Heim. It appeared in the émigré journal Numbers and shortly thereafter as a book; fifty years of oblivion later, a copy turned up in a second-hand bookshop and was translated into French, bringing overdue fame to its ...”