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“... who recently became the agency’s director. Having served as its deputy executive director under George W. Bush, Brennan returned to government in 2008 as Obama’s chief counterterrorism adviser and, in some accounts, as a kind of father confessor, blessing the president’s lethal strikes as fully compliant with Catholic thinking about morally just ...”

“... reprints of published fiction: Robinson Crusoe, Around the World in Eighty Days, all the Sherlock Holmes stories and even an unabridged run of the Strand Magazine. The depositories of copyright libraries are littered with Victorian shorthand editions of A Christmas Carol, Aesop’s fables, English-Welsh and English-Hindi dictionaries, the Old and New ...”

“... scientific curiosity. It is a little like the historic first meeting of Dr Watson and Sherlock Holmes: Holmes, horrifically, had just been beating the corpses in the hospital dissecting-room in order to verify how far bruises might be produced after death. Democritus anatomised the animals in order to find the seat of ...”

“... caper across the heath of history crying out ‘come not in here, nuncle,’ or who, as with George Austen, achieve a glimmer of reflected glory. Sister Jane left her novels: the mentally defective brother, boarded out with a poor family near Basingstoke and eventually buried in an unmarked grave, no word at all. A few parish records register that he ...”

“... 1935 collage. There’s Al Freuh’s jaunty economical outline of, unmistakably, the showman George M. Cohan spinning his cane, Paolo Garretto’s Babe Ruth as home run baseball floating in the air, unmistakably baseball and unmistakably Ruth. And Henry Major’s Ernst Lubitsch, Will Cotton’s Theodore Dreiser, Hirschfeld’s Bojangles Robinson, and ...”

“... from behind the trees in Regent’s Park – and prefers death to doctors. Hearing the dreaded Dr Holmes about to burst into the room, Septimus flings himself ‘vigorously, violently’ out of the window, to be fatally impaled on the railings below. ‘It was a subject that I have kept cooling in my mind until I felt I could touch it without bursting into ...”

“... is particularly mechanical, and can seem repellent. Conan Doyle may have identified with Sherlock Holmes and with Watson too, as most of us do, but this is very different from turning oneself into a technique, identifying with a method. Greene’s particular brand of Roman Catholicism becomes a vital part of it, and the part in which the higher ...”

“... Maschler’s achievements as a general trade publisher rank him with Archibald Constable, George Smith, John Blackwood, George Routledge, Frederick Macmillan, David Garnett, Ian Parsons, Allen Lane. It was one of the most highly regarded of today’s younger publishers, Peter Straus (now an agent), who commissioned ...”

“... than one dining-club, Hart-Davis was occupied in editing such works as the collected letters of George Moore, Max Beerbohm – above all, Oscar Wilde – and later, now for many years past, in correcting the proofs of my own books with precision and severity. The Letters of Oscar Wilde (1962) constitutes an achievement altogether unusual in its field of ...”

“... played by Dennis Hoey, whose most famous role was to be that of Inspector Lestrade in six Sherlock Holmes films during the Forties. One of the virtues of Anne Edwards’s book is that she gives in a footnote a potted biography of every actor and actress she mentions. These notes have great period interest, as well as commending themselves to film buffs. The ...”

“... from ‘the unpalatable to the disastrous’. Still, he consoles himself with a line from Sherlock Holmes: once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth. In the end, a deal with Labour was impossible. Propping up a minority Conservative administration was also out of the question, since it would have meant ...”

“... cuts a very appealing figure. She charts her course like a heroine from her favourite novelist, George Eliot: first the escape from a stifling provincialism, then a place at Oxford, followed by a vocation among ‘the poor and striving and thoughtful’. Her feminism was both instinctive and brave; unwilling to be traded on the Buxton marriage market, she ...”

“... when Jerry compares the Boston Tea Party to a Laurel and Hardy skit. This is the America, not of George W. Bush’s ‘Haves and Have Mores’, but of those who have little more than the clothes they stand up in: ‘Other bodies had clothes and possessions. All I had was – what the hell did I have?’ One thing Jerry doesn’t have is full citizenship in ...”

“... unemployed as gardeners). Usborne the indefatigable has resolved to read more of a writer called George Ade, who had a pretty turn of phrase and may have influenced the master. His Knocking the Neighbours (1911) contains the following:    He had a temperature of 102 and his ears were hanging down. Also, during the period of coma, someone had extracted ...”

“... chalkstones and liquid chalk’, as if from a burst pipe. The authors have spotted in a Sherlock Holmes story an old man ‘cram full of gout’ of whom it was said that he could chalk his billiard cue with his knuckles. Relief from gout was sought in many ways, often heroic, sometimes idiotic. The New Testament injunction ‘If thine eye offend thee, pluck ...”