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“... her breathless. And he was holding a gun.’[New paragraph.]‘Her gun.’[End of chapter.]Who is James Patterson, and why does he write like this?First, a small clue. Hillary Clinton says he’s ‘the master storyteller of our times’. We know that Patterson helped Bill (from Hope, Arkansas) to write his first novel, The President Is Missing, which went to ...”

“... not far from the Red Fort of the Mughal emperors, sits the little visited Anglican church of St James, consecrated in 1836. With its Renaissance-style dome and campanile, and painted a cheerful lemon, this church would not look out of place in Italy. In Delhi it is an oddity, as was its founder, the swashbuckling military adventurer ...”

“... to Jordan. I was surprised by the unexpected sprightliness on so many sides. The Plucky Little King (he is actually called The PLK by all officials in Washington as a matter of course) has actually succeeded in making himself rather popular He has played host with a good grace, not just to almost half a million new Palestinians, but to untold numbers of ...”

“... aficionados started touring the country in search of old records that a handful of them – Skip James, Son House, Mississippi John Hurt – were ‘rediscovered’. They became draws on the coffee-house and festival circuit, while recordings by John Lee Hooker, Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf, who had made their names playing house-rocking, amplified blues ...”

“... For some writers, the new language beats out a no man’s land of English without echoes of the King James Bible or connections to imperial dreams. It’s the imaginative transformation of the liquid capital of English as a world language in an epoch of dislocation. For others, cosmopolitanism has returned as a form of resistance to the dangers of ...”

“... and other vicious attacks, including Shelley’s depiction of him as Purganax, the chief of King Swellfoot’s council of wizards in Oedipus Tyrannus or Swellfoot the Tyrant – have condemned Castlereagh in the eyes of posterity. Castlereagh’s suicide in 1822 – he cut the carotid artery in his neck with a small penknife – reinforced the ...”

“... these texts are read only as period pieces anyway, it might appear shockingly polemical for James Shapiro to locate everything William Shakespeare wrote in 1599 in a topical context. Salzman’s aim was simply ‘to solve some of the problems raised by the theoretically informed return to history in Renaissance/early modern studies over the last fifteen ...”

“... Of the seven volumes of diaries published over the years by James Lees-Milne two have now been reissued as rather grand paperbacks, along with an eighth, a final hardback selection made by Michael Bloch. They all have titles like Ancestral Voices, Caves of Ice, Through Wood and Dale, Midway on the Waves and Prophesying Peace, and it will not escape the notice of the literate public that they are all derived, one with a bit of a spin on it, from ‘Kubla Khan ...”

“... James Angleton​ , chief of counterintelligence at the CIA for twenty years, was not the ideal spy. The ideal spy is a mouse-coloured blur in the crowd, someone like George Smiley, described by his wife as ‘breathtakingly ordinary’. There was nothing ordinary about Angleton. Once experienced, his history, his appearance, his manner, and his stubborn refusal to be clear were all indelible ...”

“... it may be in the interest of the most venerable institutions of the state that they should do so. King Henry V is all the better for having been Prince Hal, but no woman could propose to imitate the sun (or the moon?) and allow the base contagious clouds to smother up her virtue and beauty from the world in order that her charms should shine out all the more ...”

“... out of the reach of the most powerful earthly man; it forced a degree of humility on any believing king or emperor. On the other, it meant that a ruler could believe himself humble only before God, and subject to no one else, to no earthly law or institution. The Russians of Ivan’s time were well aware of this duality. Many of the tsar’s victims went to ...”

“... out of English whimsy so much as for Hoffmann’s sinister tale of the Nutcracker and the Mouse King’. Byatt burns both ends of her thematic candle at once, for clearer illumination. At the novel’s end, the First World War comes, and cruelly reveals the political irresponsibility that has sustained the long childish innocence of upper-class English ...”

“... two were fated to be mated. As the courtier, roving fixer and tireless mouthpiece for the Burger King of Palm Beach, Giuliani would relinquish all shame, honour, dignity, self-respect and semblance of continence. According to Maggie Haberman’s Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America, he stank up the bathroom on one of ...”

“... the death of Louis? Couldn’t he have intervened to arrest the chain of events that had led the king inexorably to the guillotine? In the summer of 1792, with the Austrian and Prussian armies massing on the borders of France, threatening to invade in order to restore Louis to all the ‘legitimate authority’ he had exercised before the Revolution, the ...”

“... places from the projection of Western desires and fantasy: the image of Shangri-la, derived from James Hilton’s 1933 novel, Lost Horizon, stands for a way of seeing in which Tibet and its people play little part. To look at a city’s details without feeling their associations, Barnett argues, is to misread it. To know a city as its inhabitants do, to read ...”