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“... When​ Marie-Antoinette couldn’t sleep, she would ring for a lady-in-waiting to come and read to her; a rota of lectrices was on call at Versailles at any time of day or night; before radio or talking books, this was one of the luxuries of the Ancien Régime. The queen could have lit her bedside candle and read to herself, but it wasn’t just a rich woman’s indolence that made that remedy less appealing ...”

“... And he works, always, with verve and passion. He reacts violently against the declaration of Jim Jarmusch, the most Wenders-like of American directors (long shots, long takes, cool journeys through American backwaters), that ‘I’m not interested in taking people by the hair and telling them where to look.’ Scorsese’s response to this is ...”

“... would unnerve opponents with a bellowed recital of his accomplishments: not his successes in the ring, which were not much to boast about, but a dubious curriculum vitae including ‘hotel-rat’ (i.e. thief), muleteer, snake-charmer, chauffeur, ‘ailurophile’ (cat-lover), gold prospector, nephew of Oscar Wilde, and ‘poet with the shortest hair in the ...”

“... wholesome, American mother in the home’ (that second comma registering how ‘American’ is to ring out against everything ‘un-American’). There had been a precedent for Eisenstein’s 1930 fiasco with Dreiser in Erich Von Stroheim’s with McTeague by Frank Norris, made into the ten hours of Greed in 1923 and then cut (by a studio that had merged to ...”

“... old dykes – lines of boulders, sometimes topped with turf and heather. There was not the usual ring-dyke round the croft-land and the ends of the gullies were not stopped to save animals from straying into the geos. Could there have been a system to allot the outby land into areas for which the herds from one family or another would have been ...”

“... the problems of ducking on unpredictable surfaces), play defensively (risking a catch to the ring of close fielders on the leg side), or he could step away to leg and swat the ball through the vacant offside. The consequences of this plan were several: Bradman’s batting average was halved, Larwood bowled England to victory in the series, and war was ...”

“... instance, transsexualism, child pornography, strange cults and the return to San Francisco of a Jim Jones reprieved from death. Now Maupin cut back on lurid invention, and his focus became more domestic. But his work had always been defined by its airy momentum, and lost a lot of its distinctiveness when the ride slowed down, the bunting flown at ...”

“... which the object is to hit a small, distant target with accuracy. In rifle shooting, the central ring is around fifty yards away; in archery, it is about one hundred yards to the target – from where the archer stands, it looks no bigger than the head of a drawing pin held at arm’s length. But the distances in golf are greater, and on the vast courses ...”

“... Flint, many of them Ralph Nader associates, who felt betrayed by the way Roger and Me turned out. Jim Musselman was a clever young law graduate and one of ‘Nader’s Raiders’ who collaborated with Moore on numerous anti-GM stories when Moore was the editor of the Michigan Voice. Musselman’s work is not mentioned in Roger and Me. ‘He never once said ...”

“... hundred-foot cliffs that drop from the city walls to the gentler slopes below. There’s a narrow ring of woodland around the bottom of the cliffs, and it’s easy enough for us to get out there without breathing on anyone. We’re lucky, in other words, compared to people whose jobs have disappeared, or families in small apartments in the middle of big ...”

“... connect to the internet with a loud noise of whistling timpani, suggestive of Alberich forging the ring of the Nibelung. I didn’t find this too much of a distraction, because I only used the internet to file my journalistic copy. In general I thought computers unlovely things, their functionalist design yet more evidence of the worrying convergence between ...”

“... debilitating recourse to words like real, true or authentic?’ Such terms may have a debilitating ring to them in Soho clubs, but perhaps rather less so among those families who still want to know where the Bosnian Serbs buried the bodies. Poets who poach the odd image from other poets may not be villains, but what about academics who lift their postgraduate ...”

“... cottage on the estate when she is there without her husband. At his Inauguration she wore the ring given to her by the woman with whom she is in love, the woman she will later install in a White House bedroom across from her own. The First Lady’s passionate attachment to her woman friend has cooled, however, supplanted by her feelings for a radical ...”

“... son. He got divorced from Morrissey’s mother when the singer was 17 and was later rumoured to ring radio stations insisting on his estranged son’s Irishness. Morrissey was a lovelorn fan of Oscar Wilde and James Dean, Elsie Tanner and the New York Dolls, and he appears to have made something of an art out of moping around the house in a ...”

“... only reading matter that crops up in connection with the movement is a Portuguese translation of Jim Morrison’s poetry, browsed by a Renamo defector whom Finnegan meets in Maputo. In this agnostic book, there are nonetheless certain key passages which signal Finnegan’s view that destabilisation by Pretoria was only a part of the ‘harrowing’ of ...”