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“... professional ambitions, nurtured by the example of two brilliant forebears whose lives were cut short prematurely. Grandfather Toynbee had been a successful London doctor until his self-inflicted experiments with chloroform went fatally wrong. An even more striking exemplar was the remarkable career at Balliol College, Oxford of Uncle Arnold, after whom not ...”

“... currents or lay at anchor perishing with cold – it was nearly mid-winter down there – and very short of food. Then against the advice of the experienced Davis, who said the snow would not last, Cavendish turned back, with the notion of reaching the Far East by way of the Cape, having refitted somewhere in South America. The ships separated in a blow off ...”

“... associations, the degree of autocratic control imposed on the nationalist movement seems little short of miraculous. Even the splitting-off of the separatist Muslim League did not impair this characteristic. It meant that when the British came to leave in 1947 the matter could be settled by half a dozen men in a small room. The achievement was above all one ...”

“... off. ‘Where is it?’ Starkey’s account of what the martyrologist John Foxe called, in the short novel included in his Book of Martyrs, ‘the miraculous preservation of the Lady Elizabeth’, is detailed and thorough, one of the most insightful short histories of the reign of Mary, and it corrects many supposed ...”

“... who made up with diligence what he might have lacked in brilliance.’ The claims he made for his short stories are those of a lacklustre publicist: ‘my only duty was to describe reality as it had come to me – to give the mundane its beautiful due.’ Of his choice to make suburban life his primary subject, he said: ‘Out there was where I ...”

“... mean they’re not true.’ The grandfather, David Cartwright, aka the Old Bastard or OB for short, knows what he’s talking about, as he was the power behind the throne at the Park for decades. The grandson, River Cartwright, once a promising recruit at the Park, has just been relegated to a dead-end job pushing paper or sorting through the contents of ...”

“... the dangers of taking office without a majority: Labour was dependent on Liberal tolerance. The short life of the government entrenched a distrust of coalitions and alliances that Labour has never fully shed. For all sections of the party, the memory of 1924 was sullied by the failure of the second Labour government, elected in 1929 and led again by ...”

“... of Soweto, outside Johannesburg. I sat with Lafont in his ill-lit office at the back of St Philip Neri, his parish church. The adjacent bedroom had been turned into a drop-in dormitory for young boys and as the night drew on it filled up. At regular intervals the office door would be pushed ajar and a bashful face would appear. A few words would be ...”

“... to which the testimony of famous alumni has contributed. Guardian readers have now been told that Philip Larkin and Kingsley Amis called their Old English texts ‘ape’s bum-fodder’. But if these readers get no further than the preface to the Companion, they will see what another Oxford wit, W.H. Auden, said of the same material: ‘I was spellbound. This ...”

“... the poem read as being about what it proclaims as its subject: Alexander the Great remembering Philip of Macedon.’ The middle stanza of ‘From an Asian Tent’ reads: You held me once before the army’s eyes; During their endless shout, I tired and slid Down past your forearms to the cold surprise Your plated shoulder made between my thighs. This ...”

“... from treating detective stories as historical documents through a close study of which reliable short biographies of their protagonists may be built up. In this scholarly activity numerous difficulties, needless to say, confront the biographer. Mr H. R. F. Keating has been driven to the conclusion that Hercule Poirot was aged 130 (or a little more) at the ...”

“... to be who she is. And that – apart from a grandmother of nine and the author of a novel, several short stories, and a number of children’s books published under her maiden name, Jean Howard – is a woman half of whose life was spoilt by mental illness. ‘My Golders Green, where I lived till I was twelve,’ she writes, ‘was all green dusted with ...”

“... government which might be found of service. Literature and Nationalism, essays dedicated to Philip Edwards, comes from the university world of literary studies. Though the book spends some time on Shakespeare’s view of the Welsh and Scots, the main emphasis is on Ireland – understandably, given the literary achievement of Irish writers in the early ...”

“... tradition of the op with intellectual pretensions: from Sherlock Holmes’s scientific dabbling to Philip Marlowe, who played chess games against himself between assignments. Further trickery comes by way of alcohol: not the whisky that Shakespeare consumes (Bushmills at the low end, Lagavulin on a splurge), but the stuff served up by the Irish pub’s inept ...”

“... the same pitch at the same time. Girtin, Sandby and their successors, Cotman and the tantalisingly short-lived Richard Bonington, captured as no painters before them had the most delicate effects of weather – clouds seen through other clouds, woods in a mist of rain – and, once aquatint was perfected, their work could be reproduced with tolerable ...”