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“... praying in unison, or lying in pools of blood; boys squabbling in an empty swimming-pool; women in burn wards, or begging in burqas. Kabul is a South Asian city of millions. Bollywood music blares out in its crowded spice markets and flower gardens, but it seems that images conveying colour and humour are reserved for Rajasthan.Barack Obama, in a recent ...”

“... a child might do who sets light to a whole box of matches in play. What a naughty, naughty toy to burn so quickly.’ And so to a rose-bowered climax in Venice, the physical action undescribed but sufficiently indicated by Nature’s benign responses. ‘Such was their wedding night,’ says Glyn, who did not lack nerve. ‘Oh glorious youth! And still more ...”

“... in Manhattan commemorates the stand Bishop Hughes took against a mob threatening to burn down his church in 1844. The defensive amalgamation of Irish, Catholic and Democrat extended into other eastern cities and towns (though not all, and not all the time). Byron concentrates on Americans whose descendants arrived generations ago. But immigrants ...”

“... evidence of his private life, systematically destroying his personal papers, asking friends to burn his letters, and instructing his executors to discourage would-be biographers. In company, he was notorious – at least in late middle and old age – for being aloof and misanthropic: ‘An unpleasant man,’ P.G. Wodehouse told an interviewer in the ...”

“... profitable estates lay, the Forth valley, but in the Highlands where he could act like a chief and burn out his tenantry if resistance showed. Jacobitism in the Highlands was more evancescent and more calculating than in the north-east, and probably based on a narrower social segment. The Jacobitism of some other groups than landowners is here revealed. It was ...”

“... this century’s crop already included Russ McDonald’s Shakespeare’s Late Style (2006), Gordon McMullan’s Shakespeare and the Idea of Late Writing (2007) and a Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare’s Last Plays edited by Catherine Alexander (2009). If there is something intriguingly late aesthetically about these plays, there is also something ...”

“... them for another decade, and at the end of his life, after some hesitation, he decided not to burn all the similarly revealing diaries that he had written subsequently but instead to leave them for the enlightenment of posterity, as though belatedly letting the cat out of the bag. ‘Let the world know me,’ he wrote in the diary, ‘but only when ...”

“... words should change so just by being put in rhyme. They get teeth and bite; they take fire and burn. I wonder who first thought of tying words up and twisting them back to make verses and hurt and delight all the people in the world.Poetry seems to torment its maker, its listeners and even itself: part of the pleasure in this fantasy, as Freud’s ‘A ...”

“... 200th birthday was Claire Harman’s Life, the first serious new biography since Lyndall Gordon’s Charlotte Brontë: A Passionate Life in 1994 and Juliet Barker’s The Brontës from the same year (biographies seem to come in generational bursts). All writers on the Brontës now benefit from Margaret Smith’s magisterial – much overdue ...”

“... phone calls. Someone had pushed matches through their door, and notes saying they were going to burn the house down. The notes mentioned his Italian heritage (he’s actually Russian-Polish). He assumed it was the National Front, responding to a full-page profile in the Liverpool Echo, which described him as a ‘card-carrying communist’.While he was in ...”

“... Red Sea. Surviving only in copies, the text has been held genuine by a Semitic philologist (Cyrus Gordon). Superior literacy has rendered North America more prolific in pre-Columbian testimonies. About ninety years ago, a runic inscription was dislodged from the roots of a tree in rural Minnesota: a party of Norsemen (both male and female) had got that far in ...”

“... is not an easy thing to do. Where to start? Sudan is the crucible of all colonial fantasies: Gordon in Khartoum, the epic of the Mahdi, the Fashoda Incident; then come the founding fathers of colonial ethnology, with Evans-Pritchard in the lead, followed by a legion of administrator-anthropologists and foreign travellers like Marcel Griaule and Michel ...”

“... don’t help if we actually want to defend ourselves against the consequences of our long fossil burn. They’re reassurance for do-nothing shoulder-shruggers that there’s no point in acting against man-made climate change, because we’re doomed. And when the Britain-drowned-in-one-lifetime maps are set against the predicted reality, it makes that reality ...”

“... by the hostility to the euro of the Murdoch press that had helped elect him, soon faded. But Gordon Brown’s firm refusal to abandon sterling, made from his position of strength at the Exchequer, maintained the status quo bequeathed by Major. London would sign up to the Social Chapter that Major had sidestepped, but despite increasingly frantic pressure ...”

“... my own copy to check I understood it, and found it highlighted and further marked with a cigarette burn, so I guess she must have said that to us as well. ‘Marx is not saying, for example, that the illusions that arise out of commodity fetishism are wrong; he is saying that those illusions are necessary and real but nevertheless, they are illusions.’Adorno ...”