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“... John Singer Sargent’s ‘Robert Louis Stevenson and His Wife’ (1885). The first return to Treasure Island was made by Robert Louis Stevenson himself. Fourteen years after the novel was published, Longman’s Magazine published ‘The Persons of the Tale’, in which Captain Smollett and Long John Silver step out of the narrative after the 32nd chapter to have a chat ‘in an open place not far from the story ...”

“... to a meeting at the underground command post of the 64th Army. A staff officer with a captain’s green stripes on his greatcoat called out his name. He had followed him from the command post. Krymov gave him a puzzled look. ‘This way please,’ the captain said quietly, pointing towards the door of a hut. Krymov walked past the sentry and through the ...”

“... some time after Laurence Sterne’s death in 1768 that this passage was itself plagiarised from Robert Burton’s attack on literary imitators in his introduction to The Anatomy of Melancholy. ‘As apothecaries,’ Burton observed, ‘we make new mixtures every day, pour out of one vessel into another … Again, we weave the same web still, twist the same ...”

“... with the teleprompter and grinning weirdly at random moments. Standing in front of a hideous green backdrop, he looked, as one blogger wrote, like the cottage cheese on a lime Jello salad. Apparently no longer an officer and a gentleman, he took the occasion of this extraordinary moment in American history not to congratulate the first African-American ...”

“... the potent verses entitled ‘They Receive Instructions against Chile’ (translated here by Robert Bly):But we have to see behind all these, there is somethingbehind the traitors and the gnawing rats,an empire which sets the table,and serves up the nourishment and the bullets.They want to repeat their great success in Greece.Greek playboys at the ...”

“... I wonder what you think of these?’Tolkien wrote many letters to his Catholic correspondents, Robert Murray, a Jesuit priest, and Peter Hastings, who owned a religious bookshop in Oxford, attempting to prove that this fake universe he had constructed was neither heretical nor blasphemous but entirely harmonious with orthodox theology. Where had orcs come ...”

“... cheer up. Within a week of the result, membership of the SNP more than doubled. Membership of the Green Party trebled. The Scottish Socialists are back. Women for Independence tweeted that they were looking for a bigger conference venue. When a pro-independence party rises from the ashes of Scottish Labour, as it will, and the elders pass and my children’s ...”

“... the lamps, makes it hard to rediscover what his fiancée looks like. In time, ‘the advancing green tide’ engulfs the area uncontested and roots from overgrown tropical shrubs penetrate the foundations. The beds are never changed, the food is unpleasant, whole wings are made uninhabitable by storm damage and on his first night the Major finds a rotting ...”

“... German, French, and Italian – Austrian lawyer, Jew, perfect typist, wants a position – Dr Robert Fischer, Deutschmesiterplatz 2, Vienna I.’28 July 1938: ‘Young Jewess, opera and concert singer, music teacher, Vienna Music Academy with honours, besides well-trained doctor’s assistant, speaking French, Italian, German, perfect household ...”

“... the rushed observations of Andrew Marr. An academic industry has flourished. Now both Weight and Robert Colls have written requiems for the old Britishness which are also ruminations on a new, more democratic England. Britannia, for so long a proud Amazon, armoured and helmeted, repulsing European foes and civilising barbarians is, these days, according to ...”

“... no botanist, no philosopher of wild places. He’s away before the dog accompanists are let into a green oasis that operates like the Marshalsea Prison: if you are inside when the bell sounds, you stay the night. Low-level flats, from an era of less boastful regeneration, are set back from the road behind cushions of coarse grass, teardrop flower-beds planted ...”

“... role of physician, mixing and prescribing her own patent remedy, a concoction of boiled snails, green herbs and mutton fat. Relegated soon afterwards to the more humble role of gardener, she brought the same artful mimicry of idiom and manner to the part. ‘One day, upon my mother’s paying me a visit in the garden and approving something I had done ...”

“... rain as ‘grief in arrears’ is the loveliest thing in the book), or the compact subtleties of Robert Crawford, whose short poem ‘Scotland’ is infinitely more subtle and political than the work of Didsbury and McMillan or even Peter Reading. And then the sweet, rapid brocade of Glyn Maxwell’s complex forms, or the grace of Pauline Stainer. These ...”

“... present lexicographer, so it can acquire new writers, compilers, continuers.’ In a US review, Robert Coover suggested that computer hackers might make Dictionary of the Khazars their own as a prototype hypertext, unpaginated, non-sequential, that can be entered anywhere by anybody. This looks forward to a utopian, high-tech version of the oral tradition ...”

“... with gold and silver crosses, by soldiers of a British expeditionary force in 1868, after Sir Robert Napier’s defeat of King Tewodros, who had spent many years collecting them. They are now in the possession of the British Library and the Queen, among others, and there are no plans to return them. Lalibela was named after a man born in the 12th century ...”