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“... knew themselves. We have so much of Charlotte compared to her siblings – hundreds of letters, miles of juvenilia, four complete novels and the start of a fifth, personal testimonies from many who knew her – that it often seems as if biographers are not only replying to Gaskell but to Charlotte herself, trying to catch her out, to show us her ...”

“... house. Quinn chose a flat in a small new block near the Royal London Hospital in Whitechapel, two miles closer to the centre of London. Her husband was sceptical – Whitechapel had a reputation as a rough area where the sex trade flourished – but he went with her choice and they settled in. It is a measure of the relative value of private and council ...”

“... as a schoolboy. On most Sundays in the year or two either side of 1960 he would take the bus six miles to our nearest town and return with a paper that augmented the Sunday Post – delivered to the door that morning by the village newsagent – and its claustrophobic worldview formed fifty years before in Presbyterian Dundee. Where the Observer’s wider ...”

“... over all the drawers in the work table in the spare room. Blakey rolls her eyes, sits down, pulls Richard Rorty out of her bag and prepares to wait for several hours.I guess I left this part out earlier: that I’m as ‘arty’ as my old mum. Can’t help it: it’s a mutant gene, like homosexuality. And though I can neither draw nor paint I’m fairly good ...”

“... to Zionism’s master code of Jewish exclusivism seems reduced to mere points on the map miles away from Palestine. Lebanon, the Soviet build-up, Syria, Druze and Shia militancy, the new American-Israeli quasi-treaty – these dominate the landscape, absorb political energies. Two anecdotes give a sense of the political and ideological problem I am ...”

“... the right-wing think tank Policy Exchange, whose funding sources are a jealously guarded secret, Richard Walton, the retired head of counter-terrorism at the Metropolitan Police, accused XR of trying to break up ‘democracy and the British state’. In January, City of London police put XR on a list of groups said to have extremist ideologies; they were ...”

“... The widow immediately despatched an appeal for help to General Abbott’s encampment about forty miles away (later it became a cantonment town called Abbottabad on whose outskirts Bin Laden would seek and receive refuge). She was seriously worried that her five boys might be massacred by their uncle, but further tragedy was averted. Abbott arrived with a ...”

“... more than 16 hours to be admitted. An A&E consultant at the Royal Stoke University Hospital, Dr Richard Fawcett, broadcast his frustration on Twitter. ‘It breaks my heart,’ he wrote, ‘to see so many frail and elderly patients in the corridor for hours and hours … I personally apologise to the people of Stoke for the Third World conditions of the ...”

“... Not fiction?No, not at all.Keats became quite big for me too, but first I had to go through miles of prose – everything – Biggles etc.Those sorts of thing did figure later, or maybe they were around, but they weren’t as central to my predicament as Keats was. I became a Keats figure, sitting in the library in consequence of not being allowed to do ...”

“... outlook in 25 years. He has already seen off Schröder’s attempt to install a wan version of Richard Branson as Minister of the Economy, and shaken the composure of the Bundesbank. The direction of the Government, of course, will not be set by the SPD leadership alone. The rules of any German coalition give significant leverage to the lesser partner. The ...”

“... and he put a ship’s bell in the garden. (The original lighthouse was built by his uncle Alan, 12 miles south-west of Tiree.) Fanny put benches here and there, so that Stevenson could sit on sunny days with a writing board perched on his knee.Sir Henry Taylor, a colonial reformer and poet-dramatist, had a villa in Bournemouth; he was 84 that year. He had an ...”

“... Kremlin Rising, that puts the palliators of the Financial Times to shame.2 Among historians, Richard Pipes, at one with Malia in hostility to Communism, but in temperament and outlook the all but complete opposite, has struck a characteristically dissonant note. Whereas Malia believed it was essentially the First World War that blew Russia off course ...”

“... The RebellionVII: The FactsFilm AudioI: The FireIt was​ a clear day and you could see for miles. From her flat on the 23rd floor, Rania texted one of her best friends from back home and they talked about facts. Who you love is a fact and the meals you cook are facts. When the sun shines it is a fact of God and England is a fact of life. Rania always ...”