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“... He seemed always to be in the right place at the right time: he was there for the execution of Charles I, and on the ship that brought Charles II back from exile. He watched London burn in September 1666 from the window of his house, and felt ‘a shower of Firedrops’ on his face. He experienced the terror of the Dutch ...”

“... scatter empty notebooks willy-nilly around the phone-booths of North America, in the hope and expectation that some phone-booth-using Ginsberg or Emily Dickinson will scrawl beautiful poems inside, and then pass the journal on – and the amazing thing is, they do. People go to make a telephone call, to cancel an appointment at the ...”

“... says of his brother Mycroft, but he could just as well be talking of himself. The reader can’t hope to match his deductions, only marvel at the performance. The era of cold Victorian logic was succeeded by the golden age of the 1920s and 1930s, with its cleverly arranged clues and psycho-social unravelling. In 1928 S.S. Van Dine, the creator of Philo ...”

“... they possibly have in common, these wildly different figures, the nature boy and the urban genie?Charles Arthur Russell Jr was born in Oskaloosa, Iowa in May 1951, and died in New York in April 1992 from complications related to Aids. His father, Chuck, a former naval officer, was the town mayor. It’s easy to picture something down-home and folksy, but the ...”

“... Parliament, cynosure of the Victorian feminist eye, was exclusively male. Nor was there much hope of coercing politicians without a substantial) rank and file, and this could hardly be recruited in such a way. Lord Hugh Cecil once pointed out that’a class is in its very idea a separate thing with common interests,’ whereas ‘sex is just the ...”

“... for the book Fante was then working on, The Brotherhood of the Grape (1977). In 1978, the poet Charles Bukowski mentioned his debt to Fante in his novel Women; Bukowski’s publisher, John Martin of the Black Sparrow Press, set about reprinting Fante’s books. Bukowski, who had been devoted to both books ‘like a man who had found gold in the city ...”

“... am shortly going to take as much of my accumulated dose of sleeping draught as I can manage and hope that it will prove lethal. You know the reasons, food shortages and increasing debility and weariness – unlikeliness of us winning the war etc. etc.’When the news came through of Norton’s death, Elisabeth’s parents, who were in Ankara, sent a ...”

“... Orwell for undergraduates, his own ten commandments for his infinitely sicker graduate students. I hope that Melanie Phillips of the Guardian is safely past the forty mark, since she writes as though she is: ‘Correct spelling, punctuation and an elementary grasp of sentence structure now seem to be luxuries, even among the so-called educated classes with a ...”

“... There are whole pages off which one can feel the acne rise. Then he adds, piously: ‘My earnest hope ... is that this book should not be sexist.’ In fact, it is beyond sexism. A man who, with a perfectly straight face, can describe the photographer hero of Antonioni’s movie, Blow Up, as having ‘a corps of lovely cavorting dolly birds at his ...”

“... was going on, or when the Tories wrapped the Albert Hall in a blue ribbon, it was hard not to hope that our disdainful visitor was spending the day somewhere else. But where? On every side, there seems to be some Toytown farce in progress. What, for instance, would Gore make of Christine Hamilton? What would he make of Martin Bell? Too British to be ...”

“... children of the world, his eyes caged and hostile behind glass – still Péguy said that Hope is a little child. Violent contrariety of men and days; calm juddery bombardment of a silent film showing such things: its canvas slashed with rain and St Elmo’s fire. Victory of the machine! The brisk celluloid clatters through the gate; the cortège ...”

“... The early years of the Revolution saw one or two competent plays, such as Chénier’s Charles IX, but they were written along traditional lines. Laya’s excellent Ami des Lois – equally conventional in style – was suppressed by the Commune after only four performances, on political grounds. The theatre of the Terror was represented by such ...”

“... any endeavour, many with great skill and ability, can take justifiable Pride and will, I earnestly hope, feel that they will be sharing in the Honour conferred on me.’ Bradford. We film a medical room in a dye-works in Prague in 1910 set up in the empty stockroom of Downs, Coulter and Co, a textile merchants that closed down in 1974. On the wall is an ...”

“... back a long way, and perhaps the classic illustration is to be found in the 1870s with the case of Charles Marvin, who later established a considerable reputation as an author on the affairs of Europe and Central Asia. Contemporary critics praised his books about Russia and the East. Except by scholars, these works are long forgotten, but what is remembered is ...”

“... the source of Turner’s interest. Litter and debris are for him emblems of the fallacy of hope, intimations of mortality. Rubbish attracts him because it is the favour to which we must all come, the condition to which time will reduce even our most monumental achievements. As the sun sinks on Carthage, that proud city seems already to be dissolving ...”