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“... sounds. Is it Monday or Tuesday? (Does it matter?) Lately the most reliable method of counting the passage of time has been not in days or weeks but in deaths. In New York City, more than seven thousand people have died, more than twice as many as were killed in the 11 September attacks.Most of my friends aren’t leaving their flats. Since recovering my sense ...”

“... very late for a Marvell lyric – not impossible, but the evidence cited is a faint echo of a passage in Paradise Lost. In fact Paradise Regained is a far more relevant connection, and so Marvell’s poem, a kind of throwback, would have to have been written after 1671; but there is no need to suppose that Marvell was mimicking Milton or vice versa ...”

“... before it. Allusions by Drake to contemporary politics seem to have been few and far between. A passage quoted by Sharpe as a reflection on the new republic of 1649 appears, from the excerpt we are given, to be merely a somewhat cumbersome exposition of a Renaissance commonplace about the danger of allowing an interval between the death of one king and the ...”

“... to attorney, and from there to secretary of the Bombay council. One of his colleagues in India, Charles Carmichael, encouraged him to try his hand at a piece of pornography, though Gladfelder, who has a penchant for the dialogic and intertextual, speculates that the work, later to become Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure and then, revised and ...”

“... of Planes, Trains and Automobiles, his joint-favourite film (the other is Solaris). In the opening passage of his new novel, The Bee Sting, which has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize, the soberly reported details of a man who killed his family then ‘turned the gun on himself’ give way to a less appalled reaction: ‘Elaine just said she was surprised ...”

“... includes a reference to ‘anaesthetic tables’), William James, James Thomson, William Acton, Charles-Louis Philippe, W.R. Burnett (a crime novelist in whose High Sierra – published in 1940 – the phrase ‘She was … a one-night-stand type’ occurs), Edward Winslow Martin (author of The Secrets of the Great City, 1868, which mentions ‘cheap ...”

“... a commodity broker. But then he arranged new vacuum-cleaners in a perspex case and sold them to Charles Saatchi. ‘It is my belief,’ announces Januszczac, that art today is largely in the business of supplying frisson, little niblets of existential uncertainty, ways of not-knowing, mysteries, small after-hours pleasures for overworked urban minds ...”

“... this, forgetting to mention that Rome was in fact taken by mercenaries of the Catholic Emperor Charles V. More was astonishingly disingenuous. Throughout the late 1520s, he claimed that anti-clericalism was identical with heresy, when he, an early anti-clerical, knew this to be untrue. In reply to one Simon Fish, who had argued that England’s travails ...”

“... Standing on the deck of the sinking Lusitania, the American theatrical manager Charles Frohman spoke his last words. ‘Why fear death?’ he was heard to say. ‘It is the most beautiful adventure in life.’ He may have been echoing J.M. Barrie, whose ‘awfully big adventure’ had only recently chimed with children of all ages ...”

“... The Rebirth of an English Country House, written by the new earl and Tim Knox, reproduces a passage from the journal of an 18th-century traveller called Joseph Pococke, who visited in 1754 and was particularly impressed with the grounds:The gardens are very beautifully laid out, in a serpentine river, pieces of water, lawns, &c, and very gracefully ...”

“... sickening motion of the Deathworm had replaced the usual flow of blood in my veins.’ In the same passage Shelley, with ‘his ardent mouth, his exalted being, his simplicity and enthusiasm’, is exempt from blame. ‘She poisoned my life,’ Mary wrote in an uncharacteristic outburst to Trelawny. ‘I would not go to Paradise with her as a companion ...”

“... that broke out in 1919, as later nationalist piety would insist. It is startling to read, in Charles Townshend’s fine study, The Republic: The Fight for Irish Independence, the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB) leader, John O’Leary who, in Yeats’s poem, shared his grave with the corpse of ‘romantic Ireland’, observing that the Brotherhood’s ...”

“... in 1904 did not happen again. The most influential anti-semite in the early years of the state was Charles Bewley. He was a Quaker convert to Catholicism, a senior counsel and diplomat. In 1921 he went to Berlin as Irish Consul. Within a year he was causing trouble. In a Berlin café he insulted Robert Briscoe, who was visiting, and the Jewish owner, and was ...”

“... none seemed adequate. In 1667 a committee of three – the architect Louis Le Vaux, the painter Charles Le Brun and the scientist and architectural theorist Claude Perrault – was set up. These three men were asked to co-operate on a final design. The east and south fronts, as they were built, have elements taken from existing work (windows on the ground ...”

“... well have been thought capricious at the time. Who recommended the omission of Stan Laurel and Charles Laughton from the 1960s volume, and was he or she later fired for incompetence? Was Radclyffe Hall left out of the Forties volume because she was unlikely to be remembered, or because she was best forgotten? Was it a prejudice against social ...”