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“... Sure enough, Jesus appeared to the 16-year-old Moon and informed him that he was the chosen man, thus making him one of the hundred-plus messiahs Korea had spawned in only a century. According to Moon’s official biography, he then gained a degree as an electrical engineer at Waseda University in Japan (though the university has no record that he was ...”

“... tall, slender volumes in which, year by year and parish by parish, priests recorded every man, woman and child in the city, their attempts to spell foreign names providing not a few problems for the modern researcher. Widening his field of enquiry to the whole Italian peninsula and the whole of the 18th century, Brinsley Ford then began to read and ...”

“... that is too strong,’ Leclerc reiterated a month later. He seemed to fear that the deported man might suddenly reappear. His very presence in the colony, he warned, would once again set it alight. Toussaint died of exposure and tuberculosis in 1803. Every Haitian schoolchild knows his last words by heart: ‘In overthrowing me, you have cut down in San ...”

“... pages of the magazine, then only recently transformed by its odd and near invisible editor Hubert de Cronin Hastings, Betjeman’s jocular, impressionable soul was temporarily stolen by the hard men of the Modern Movement. Then, after Betjeman resigned, along came Pevsner, to hammer home the determinist message with which the magazine was obsessed. Or that is ...”

“... animal cunning; the son takes her side and does the necessary (‘It’s up to me to be the man of the house’), but she is allowed only two poems to voice her own complaints. It is left to her son to do most of the accusing: It was a fugitive childhood. Aged four, I was chased round and round the table by my father, who fell and broke his arm he was ...”

“... men might be more interesting than their books his book was definitely more interesting than its man. Conversely, there are good writers who are nonetheless more interesting to read about than to read, and Mrs Gaskell is one of them. Few Victorians would have been more agreeable to encounter, less likely to disappoint, intimidate, or merely bore. She was ...”

“... and when I’d return, he wouldn’t even have noticed that I’d been gone.’ Sartre wrote to de Beauvoir that Huston ‘shuns thought because it makes him sad’. How could he work, he asked, with a man who had told him his unconscious was a big void? One senses that their mutual dislike was physical. Sartre, the ...”

“... Once upon​ a time, in the good old days of Walter Benjamin, I thought of writing a book called Paul Cézanne, A Portrait Painter in the Era of High Positivism. Its question would have been: How do human beings offer themselves to ‘portrayal’ in a culture where they understand themselves, and expect others to understand them, as ...”

“... and the Pethick Lawrences travelled hundreds of miles to a remote dorp in the Karoo, Hanover or De Aar, to hear her opinions. Her oratory to congresses summoned during the Boer War to protest against British farm-burning tactics was described by one observer as ‘transfigured’: ‘I have heard much indignant eloquence, but never such a molten torrent of ...”

“... d’Estissac helped him study medicine. Jean du Bellay, the Cardinal Archbishop of Paris, was a man with the ear of Francis I, a friend of Thomas Cromwell, a defender of the Henrican divorce, a sympathiser with many of Luther’s doctines and an admirer of Melanchthon. He protected Rabelais as author and employed him as doctor. Rabelais was ...”

“... rifles and now count paperclips – draw up plans for when the Germans walk in and become the de facto power. Who is dropping the bombs? Is it the Germans, or is it the English, aiming to discredit the Germans? Half-hidden in the murk engendered by censorship, turf smoke and the fog which is the habitual climate of the novel, mysterious parcels of rumour ...”

“... in the Louvre, was published for the first time in 1930: it had been catalogued as ‘une dalle de marbre, envoyée de Nazareth en 1878’. This document is an imperial edict forbidding under penalty the violation of sepulchres; and experts in Greek epigraphy put the lettering in the first century of our era. The Nazareth ...”

“... woman with both gymnastic gusto and a sophisticated bon goût. There was the Plump and Horny Older Man, of course: the notorious hack writer and journalist, Henri Gauthier-Villars, better known to posterity as ‘Willy’, whom Colette married in 1893 soon after coming to Paris from her native Burgundian village of Saint-Sauveur-en-Puisaye. Willy (as his nom ...”

“... the Poor People’s March of socialists and anarchists. The cops far outnumbered the protesters. A man with a megaphone and a black plastic boot on his head addressed the police: ‘They’ve got you dressed up like turtles.’ The turtles kettled the marchers to the east. I heard a libertarian carrying a Ron Paul sign ...”

“... course of Breathless, in the scene where the small-time gangster Michel Poiccard, played by Jean-Paul Belmondo, dives into a cinema on the Champs Elysées in order to shake off a wearisome tail. The film which is up on the screen turns out to be Budd Boetticher’s Westbound, one of the Randolph Scott cycle, although the voice that we hear on the soundtrack ...”