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“... of the icon that stands in for Clift, a potent image of the suffering star. Having seen himself in Howard Hawks’s Red River (1948), Clift, so the story goes, knew that fame was coming to him, and grabbed the opportunity to get drunk anonymously one last time. In the years of his renown, it could seem as though his aim was to hold on to that anonymity while ...”

“... French were found burnt in their defensive positions, and a large number of the wounded showed marks of the flames which had destroyed both uniforms and limbs. All around there lay rifles and swords, knapsacks and cartridges, the remains of limbers which had been blown up, broken gun-carriages and wheels, and a large number of hideously torn and mangled ...”

“... schools of early and mid-20th-century planning – the Garden City movement founded by Ebenezer Howard and architectural modernism – were anti-urban, associating cities with slums, disease and pollution. And their wariness of high-density living infected government policy across much of the world in the postwar decades, with city leaders encouraging the ...”

“... Phillips wrote. ‘There were still on the roadside the remains of several corpses, and the marks of where many others had been interred: the villages almost entirely deserted and the houses fallen down.’ One of the people he met was the raja of Sanggar, ‘himself a spectator of the late eruption’, whose kingdom at the foot of the volcano had been ...”

“... second hand. But she can tell which of the dames could really talk the talk. Myrna Loy gets high marks, and not just for the Thin Man movies. There are no prizes for spotting that she was good in those. But DiBattista can see that Loy was already good in her supporting role as the narcoleptic man-eater in Rouben Mamoulian’s Love Me Tonight in 1932. Ginger ...”

“... it seems to be the Cuban character, anguished and sorrowful behind a façade of conviviality, that marks the Castillo brothers as poets of despair: ‘Many of his friends were that way, troubled souls. They would seem happy – especially when they’d talk about women and music – but when they had finished floating through the euphoric layer of their ...”

“... folds. Following a disastrous Booker ceremony at which he comports himself on camera ‘worse than Howard Jacobson’ (‘impossible,’ someone interjects), Francis is recruited by Nada Television to research a European man of letters with a mysterious past and a desperately unconvincing name – Dr Bazlo Criminale. The aim is to produce a series, ‘Great ...”

“... Writing Degree Zero remains a vivid and fast-moving work, full of delicate ironies and marks of affection, and it can still surprise us. On this reading, for example, I was much taken with Barthes’s evident fondness for what he attacks. The classical age (which in Barthes’s sweeping view extends to 1848) is repressive and deceitful, the ...”

“... to be the muse of true irony. This biography does useful service, but not much more, bearing the marks of one kind of worthy but unadventurous labour history. If Carpenter is to make sense in a new version, it will only be because he managed, in an actual historical struggle, to combine politics with other things: sexual emancipation, an anarchism not ...”

“... to light to alter the picture. A better idea might be to follow the lead of Hugh Kenner, as Donald Howard is now doing, writing an account not of Chaucer but of the Chaucer era, ‘an X-ray moving picture of how our epoch was created from the medieval’, as he puts it, echoing Kenner on Pound. To do that with Cervantes would be to make a genuine attempt to ...”

“... Ambrosio is finally possessed by Lucifer at his most lurid: ‘His blasted limbs still bore marks of the Almighty’s thunder … His hands and feet were armed with long Talons … his hair was supplied with living snakes, which twined themselves round his brow with frightful hissings.’ The extremities of Ambrosio’s vice would be enough to transfix ...”

“... French films but also the work of directors favoured by French critics of a certain persuasion. Howard Hawks, for instance, who ‘does not distort the real: he chooses from it the gestures, the moments and places that will be most revelatory’; and John Ford, for whom ‘creation is only that unique and decisive gesture – giving things a ...”

“... Liberal, rationalist Murrays, with Lady Mary’s aristocratic connections to the Howards of Castle Howard, were more priggish than piggish, and this suited Toynbee nicely. They were admirable parents-in-law (ultimately ex-parents-in-law) and Toynbee formed a lifelong attachment to them as ‘my parents as well as Rosalind’s’. Whether Rosalind ...”

“... on 19 August at the head of Loch Shiel. The monument at Glenfinnan, erected a century later, marks the romantic spot and has ensured that the ‘45 remains in the minds of tourists. News of the landing had only just reached London. A bounty of £30,000 was put on the Pretender’s head and Sir John Cope set off into the Highlands with about 1400 men to ...”

“... rather donnish Asian pharmacist is a bit nonplussed and as he serves me I offer to go next door to Marks and Spencer for their security man. But the blonde assistant is pluckily standing her ground. The young man has a really mean face and the pharmacist thinks the best thing is to wait until he goes. Which he is doing when he spots a small woman in her ...”