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“... offspring of her own beloved spaniel.) For Barrett, who read avidly in Balzac, Stendhal, Eugène Sue and the elder Dumas, as well as Hugo and Sand, this was a literature whose ‘poetry’ and greatness were undeniable – despite its ‘monstrous & hideous morality’: ‘They light me up, & make me feel alive to the ends of my fingers.’ Not ...”

“... stretched above the haze of smoke. Rows of red-brick houses radiated on all sides and above them rose blocks of factories with many of their windows catching the light.’ There’s a piece of scene-painting for the nostalgic to latch onto. A novel like McLaverty’s Call my brother back (1939) offers a view of Belfast as unpretentious as a game of hopscotch ...”

“... interesting. Arthur Andersen is a proud survivor of the stampede of top accountancy firms to sue each other for alleged negligence in auditing and handling the accounts of clients who had gone bust in the recession of the early 1990s. Over the Barlow Clowes fiasco, the Government, represented by Ernst and Young, sued Touche Ross; over BCCI, Touche Ross ...”

“... held in London in October 2013, I sat behind two trans women who objected when the historian Sue O’Sullivan described how 1970s feminism had allowed young women for the first time to explore their own vagina, to claim it as intimate companion. Her account was seen by them as transphobic for excluding trans women who most likely will not have had that ...”

“... skills offer them the same possibilities? According to Chesterton, ‘twenty million young women rose to their feet and said: “We will not be dictated to,” and immediately became shorthand typists.’ But they had also found a skill that afforded them a better wage than factory work, improved conditions, and, if they were so inclined, the opportunity to ...”

“... praise the clerk who attended on them, Robert Aslett, for his unfailing diligence. Aslett later rose to become Second Cashier and was in line for the top job, but he lost thousands on private speculations and stole thousands more in Exchequer bills to cover his losses. He was condemned to death, the sentence commuted to life imprisonment, a mercy not ...”

“... had merged into the Alliance, he still carried with him not only a posse of adoring women – Sue Slipman, Polly Toynbee and Rosie Barnes among them – but even such a seasoned campaigner as John Cartwright. One reads their names and wonders how true believers in Elmer Gantry felt when the charisma wore off.Crewe and King talk of the Gang of Four in ...”

“... one; her presence had been enough, it seemed, to bring one into being on the spot. She decided to sue for discrimination. Britain is one of the last major European countries without a legal ban on the face veil. While there are the same concerns here about the integration of Muslims as there are across Europe, consecutive UK governments have preferred to ...”

“... to France in 1786 and, taking his mother’s name, became a soldier. During the Revolution, he rose through the ranks and was a general at 33. He was a man of commanding presence, great courage and colossal physical strength: it was said that ‘the Black Devil’ could hold four rifles at the end of his outstretched arm, one finger in each barrel. In ...”

“... climate change remains a ‘phoney war’ (their term), in which fossil fuel companies pretend to sue for peace and greenery as they push forward with extraction. (As Laleh Khalili noted in the last issue of the LRB, ‘more than six hundred fossil fuel lobbyists, the most at any COP conference, registered as delegates’ at Sharm El-Sheikh – ‘a quarter ...”

“... set in and Khomeini made it clear that he would not – contrary to Saddam’s expectations – sue for peace. The IRGC’s hand was strengthened by the failure of the regular Army’s winter offensives; the volunteer forces got more resources and prestige as a result. (This trend accelerated after President Abol-Hasan Bani-Sadr, who had championed the ...”

“... siesta ... At nightfall, at the oppressive moment of transition, a storm of carnivorous mosquitoes rose out of the swamps, and a tender breath of human shit, warm and sad, stirred the certainty of death in the depths of one’s soul. This pace, this level of realism, tends towards metaphor rather than allegory. We never quite lose life, life in our world, the ...”

“... Not because there’s a lack of material. Here’s Eric talking to another talk-show host, Charlie Rose: ‘Oxford had these long breaks so I could leave Oxford and I could go to work with Mother Teresa’s Missionaries of Charity. I could go to Cambodia and work with kids who lost limbs to landmines. I could go to Albania … ’ Look him up in the New York ...”

“... said this: he was a consummate conversationalist. I once attended a life drawing session in which Sue Tilley – the model in Freud’s painting Benefits Supervisor Resting and related etchings – answered questions from the audience as she modelled, inspired in part by her experience of chatting to Freud during her sittings. I found it almost impossible to ...”

“... military regime and the Revolutionary United Front: between 1991 and 1995, Sierra Leone’s debt rose from 1.3 to 1.4 billion dollars, which could not account for the drastic deterioration in debt service ratio unless exports had plunged – and that is exactly what happened, as rebel activity and an unscrupulous army ate into civilian productive ...”