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“... van was there? Must have felt it. See things in their foreheads perhaps. Kind of sense of volume. Weight. Would he feel it if something was removed? The new edition has, instead of ‘Weight’: ‘Weight or size of it, something blacker than the dark. Wonder would ...’ (I can’t ...”

“... pages. Most of Keegan’s deaths occur in the course of battle, and not every battle gets the same weight. He has chosen a number of battles which he regards as typical of their kind during the war – an air battle, a city battle, an amphibious battle, and so on. This sometimes gives the sense that the text is several books rolled into one, and it might well ...”

“... he should stop torturing himself over the fate of the Jews it was, he confessed, as if a great weight had been lifted. He found approval again, late in life, in an episode that does him no credit. He began the most improbable love affair with a woman in her thirties who believed what he said and approved uncritically of his moral stance. His lonely ...”

“... very neat and clear and carelessly frank and ingenious way ... close-cropped, bullet-head, of fair weight, almost quite white; laughing little hazel eyes, jolly hooked nose and most definite mouth; short, short (five feet three or two at the most), swells slightly in the middle – soft, sausage-like on the whole – and ends neatly in fat little feet and ...”

“... line in France and have held up the Allies for longer. But Hitler was also convinced that the main weight of the Allied attack would come in the Pas de Calais, making a powerful counter-offensive absolutely vital to protect the Ruhr. In the event, it had to be improvised far to the west, where holding the line and counter-attacking were always going to be more ...”

“... damp and dilapidated house in Italy with dodgy investments and asset sales, in Davy Chadwick; Richard Verey in Slide, after spells in the Foreign Service and on Wall Street, effectively on the run from himself, finally forced back to what he knows best of all after running out of world: ‘I might not be here, in this ridiculous landscape, hurrying down ...”

“... his notes: ‘And are you still drinking two bottles of wine a day?’ Some of the best things in Richard Klein’s brilliant, wayward book Eat Fat* are about the way in which the medical profession rushes after certain facts and conclusions while phlegmatically ignoring others. The medical received wisdom which particularly gets his goat is to do with the ...”

“... he fought to keep a railway line out of the Lake District – but I wonder if he ever felt the weight of the din of cities in pastoral places and calculated what their effect might be. Not that I’m against din or cities as such, but I do wonder about these leftover spaces. Someone remarked to me recently that the reason you lose your recent memory after ...”

“... Chandler, and the author allows for injury time. But the story moves fast, and bears lightly its weight of information about the MVD and KGB, the work of the Ethnological Institute in reconstructing the missing face of a corpse, the Soviet monopoly on sable furs, and such ordinary things as the price of beer. It has a Russian kind of poetry – ‘There was ...”

“... between the experience of seeing something and earlier English poetry. It has a tincture of Richard Crashaw’s Counter-Reformation gory godliness; a flavour of Gerard Manley Hopkins in the way it risks going too far with the alliterating ‘bleb’ and ‘blood’; and the echt Hill quality of making it appear that just seeing something can hurt. The ...”

“... between old (sentimental) socialism and the new (hard) left. The hero of News from Nowhere, Richard Stern, updates Caute’s earlier hero, middle-aged, middle-of-the-ideological-road Steven Bright, the fortyish academic trapped between two eras whose crack-up was portrayed in The Demonstration (1970) and The Occupation (1971). The formal advantage of ...”

“... the modern Saudi state. None of this would seem extraordinary without the oil and the enormous weight of Saudi investment in the Western economic system. Saudi Arabia is the last great Muslim state to have been created in the classic manner, from an alliance between bedouin warriors and the men of religion. The first Saudi state enjoyed a comparatively ...”

“... had been so horrible to her. We are more likely to think of Princess Diana, who, allowing for weight and age, triggers many of the same responses. Reading about the huge crowds that sang the Claimant to Newgate and greeted him on his release and crowded into Paddington Cemetery for his pauper’s funeral, one cannot help thinking of that eerie wail that ...”

“... with the lines and features of the young man’s or woman’s countenance.’ Notwithstanding the weight and elaborateness of those four volumes, Lavater considered the characterological study of the face as being in its infancy. His and his disciples’ hopes that it would develop into an exact science were not fulfilled. For the next century, its indirect ...”

“... concentration, and I could understand why his wife once said to me: ‘Do you find that you lose weight when you work hard? Meyer does.’ All the while Schapiro either commented on the mise-en-page, comparing one sheet with its neighbour, or pointed out to us small, but to his mind significant, details or irregularities of form, or mark, or placement of ...”