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“... had no idea where Latimer was. When they persisted, however, she agreed that she’d probably gone straight from planting the bomb in Manchester to Latimer, where she’d driven around in a car similar to the suspicious red one which had been seen in the area before the bombing. After that there was a bit of a hiccup in the investigation. Police inquiries ...”

“... Morality Play, it summons up the devils and demons that await those who stray from the theological straight and narrow. This in turn agrees with the play’s ostensible message, which is that Faustus’s aspirations as a magician lead him into an alliance with the devil, and so to eternal damnation. ‘Regard his hellish fall,’ the Chorus grimly ...”

“... but with a further contrast provided by the broadly swept grey and white of the sink (the broad straight-sided type known as a Belfast, much painted by Freud) and by bare canvas marked only by the traces of preliminary charcoal sketches. Freud has made many paintings – including a mural – of cyclamens, which he finds a particularly difficult subject as ...”

“... a physicist and eminent populariser of science told the producer that whereas a genius such as Michael Faraday would have been awarded three different Nobel Prizes had they then existed, Maxwell would only have won one. No room for him on Auntie’s Olympus. I have no idea which of Maxwell’s achievements might have gained this anachronistic reward: his ...”

“... openings of the unequal hills’. As her biographers point out, this makes a line that could be straight out of The Prelude: ‘Through different openings of the unequal hills.’ Since William and Dorothy lived in each other’s consciousness at this stage, the thing is natural enough, and William was speaking no more than the truth when he wrote that ...”

“... drinking-fountain captains and clean-plate commandos, where it is ‘good citizenship’ to sit up straight. But, on the whole, reviewing this novel is rather like eating a plateful of smarties for breakfast. A Separate Development and From Little Acorns are imports. Fortnight’s Anger is British-originated, a first novel from the philosopher, barrister and ...”

“... Presumably the inspiration here was Kipling’s story ‘Proofs of Holy Writ’, but the idiom is straight Bardic Romance: ‘New Place, when he got there, was bright as a rubbed angel, Anne his wife and Judith his daughter yet unmarried having nought much to do save buff and sweep and pick up hairs from the floor. The mulberry tree was doing well.’ Yet, if ...”

“... in the back as he crawled away on his hands and knees. The bullet entered his buttock and went straight through his heart. Someone had filmed the young man’s death, so there was no doubt about what he was doing. Widgery concluded that the bullet which got him must have been intended for someone else. The likelihood, suggested by the evidence and by what ...”

“... superstate, and ‘the people’ is plastered across almost every Euro-story. In February, Michael Portillo was praised for reminding Chancellor Kohl that the nation state was far from a thing of the past: ‘OUR nation is very important to the people of the United Kingdom. We’ve given away enough to Europe already.’ Kohl is ‘just interested in ...”

“... hard stuff, of course, is a different matter. Uncollected in the Faber anthology is a moment in Michael Wharton’s ‘Peter Simple’ memoir when one of the more heroic Fleet Street pub-performers kept a long-postponed appointment with his doctor. After tapping and humming away, the quack inquired mildly; ‘D’you drink at all?’ Well-primed for the ...”

“... much more familiar to the modern academic than ‘guns and sails’. Bert Hall by contrast plunges straight into the unfamiliar world of Early Modern technology, the ‘black box’ as he calls it, whose inputs and outputs are commonly known to historians but whose inner functions are felt to be of no interest. Historians of technology (a small group) are ...”

“... indexes of their own books into distinct satires, long series of mocking entries presented with a straight face. Bentley’s qualities, for instance, included ‘egregious dulness … Pedantry … familiar acquaintance with Books that he never saw’. No one did this sort of thing more skilfully than Pope. The index to his magnificent parody of the scholarly ...”

“... she couldn’t get up without me. I helped her in the shower, singing bad renditions of Madonna, Michael Jackson and Wham! songs when she got flustered with drying herself and putting on face cream and brushing her teeth and pulling up her tights. (Approximate versions of 1980s pop aren’t prescribed for Alzheimer’s, but music very much is.) I found new ...”

“... political edge could be tolerated: anyone who showed any sign of that kind of talent was, like Michael Heseltine, bound to come to grief. By 1987, when the Leaderene had won her third straight election, the Cabinet was stacked with rabbits, nerds and characters with sufficiently low testosterone levels to endure repeated ...”

“... led to his release by a band of soldiers in the civil wars; that he likes to open his bowels straight after he gets out of bed; that he prefers fish to meat; that he has a small penis; that an entrepreneurial valet stole some pages of his Essays. And we meet and grow familiar with a cast of real and semi-fictionalised characters: Montaigne’s great dead ...”