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“... the Embassy, but Tuan said foreigners were not allowed. He wouldn’t accept anything from me: not cash, not cigarettes, neither threats nor entreaties. But then he pointed to a door at the side of the building and held up three fingers – three minutes. The door was the entrance to a stairwell finished in drab lime. The stairs themselves were cordoned off by ...”

“... He was always around the corner and out of sight,’ Henry James wrote of his older brother William as a child. ‘He was clear out before I got well in.’ The philosopher C.S. Peirce said something similar about the grown man. ‘He so concrete, so living, I a mere table of contents.’ Josiah Royce, a life-long friend and Harvard colleague of William James, with whom he agreed philosophically scarcely ever, offered a fine parody of the pragmatism so closely associated with his companion’s name ...”

“... of the News of the World, then edited by Coulson, intercepted the voicemail messages of Princes William and Harry. Goodman was arrested, and the police found 15 confidential palace phone books at his house in Putney. They also found five thousand names mentioned in 11,000 pages of handwritten notes at the home and in the office of Glenn Mulcaire, the ...”

“... This was true of the most spectacular case of Shakespearean forgery. In 1795 a teenager called William Henry Ireland pretended to have found a series of documents connected with Shakespeare. His father, Samuel Ireland, loved making trips to Stratford to pick up dubious Shakespeareana. Indeed he loved everything to do with Shakespeare a lot more than he ...”

“... really separates a masterpiece of the genre like Greene’s from a frequently attractive work like William Dalrymple’s In Xanadu is that Greene seeks no pretext or context or subtext for his trip other than himself. Dalrymple’s, on the other hand, is both complicated and distracted by his notion of retracing the ancient travels of Marco Polo from Jerusalem ...”

“... other European country can point to anything like this. Though the country was conquered by Duke William of Normandy in 1066 the structures of the English state survived – and if the main point of governmental institutions is to perpetuate themselves, then those which the Anglo-Saxons founded have been remarkably successful. The six centuries of ...”

“... Nationale and the Bourse now stand, to say nothing of the American territories, millions in cash and 15 country estates. In principle there seems to have been nothing to prevent his owning everything he took a fancy to. He was a gambler, a duellist and, according to Marx, a ‘pleasant character mixture of swindler and prophet’. Buchan shares Marx’s ...”

“... of company now left me in the world.’ To be of that fellowship, one had to be pretty determined: William Allingham, the editor of Fraser’s Magazine, was a regular companion on Carlyle’s afternoon walks, though he is ‘perpetually busy with Fraser & as I told himself long ago has a tendency to be a bore’. Carlyle’s collective term for visitors was ...”

“... one of the theatre producer David Belasco’s first collaborators. He discouraged his sons William and Cecil from going into the theatre but they didn’t listen. William de Mille, Agnes’s father, became a successful New York playwright, known for dramas with a social conscience; Cecil became a Hollywood ...”

“... important matter, so dear to the heart of Archbishop Laud, the City failed to raise the necessary cash. But this was not so. The City responded with enormous generosity. By 1636, the national fund amounted to nearly £56,000, most of it raised in London. The money enabled Inigo Jones to rebuild the west front of the cathedral and to restore the choir – work ...”

“... outfit, with a list of staff and advisers that includes the Conservative peers Paul Deighton and William Hague, director and chairman respectively. The former Labour minister Shriti Vadera sits on the advisory board. ‘Hakluyt sells its political connections,’ a contact who has worked in London’s corporate intelligence world for decades told ...”

“... few months of 1929 he liquidated all his stocks, prudently turning them into Treasury bonds and cash – just before the Great Crash of 24 October. That was the fortune he lived on for the rest of his life, and it was quite big enough to allow him to retire at the height of the Depression, aged just 46. Loomis was very posh, too. His social network centred ...”

“... by Leonardo DiCaprio, arrives in town. He is an army veteran and has come to work with his uncle, William Hale (De Niro). His first job is as a taxi driver. It comes as a real shock when we see and hear him blandly giving instructions for murder as if he was telling someone where to put the furniture. We knew he was grumpy from the first shot of him, but he ...”

“... found a recommendation and where the queerness might possibly be stomached. I mean Blackwood.’ William Blackwood and Sons, publishers of Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, had been stomaching queerness and Scotchness – and much else besides – for the best part of a century. In the event, they rejected Stevenson’s book, but his instinct had been ...”

“... adoring and talented sisters, and innumerable sympathetic friends, including Maria Edgeworth and William Wordsworth. His scientific star never publicly waned: just before his death, in 1865, he was being honoured as one of the world’s greatest scientists. In the Encyclopaedia Britannica he merits a longer column than either of those two other Sir ...”