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“... memories of the Nuremberg Trials by envisioning a future in which figures like Cardinal Ratzinger, William F. Buckley Jr and Jesse Helms would be held to account for the hatefulness of their pronouncements about people with Aids. ACT UP New York was founded in March 1987, but perhaps sparked as much as founded, thanks to the now-or-never rhetoric of the ...”

“... bleed together. Twins run in the family – Engel herself would give birth to twins, William and Charlotte, in 1965. There are sisters whose lives ‘are part of a serial compulsively read’. There is the complicated shape of the mother, setting up the sticks of fiction in a flower bed, the source of those raw running thoughts in the mind. The ...”

“... John Elton for an American literary agent with a disfiguring hair transplant) and passages of broad pastiche, such as this from a novel about Shakespeare: ‘“Fye, Will,” said Lucretia, arching backwards and pulling William towards her, “keep thy wit for thy plays, for wit is a poor actor that comes on and plays ...”

“... a motoring journalist who hates ‘CND lesbians’ can come at you with the moral authority of William Hazlitt. Last year a petition was handed in to Downing Street demanding that Clarkson be made prime minister: it had 49,500 signatures. It is not easy to think of a time when the British car industry was not in a state of some kind: a state of ...”

“... was over the name. I favoured (homage to Izaak Walton) the Lea spelling, where they went for the (William) Burroughs-suggestive Lee. Inspector Lee. Willie Lee. Customised paranoia: double e, narrowed eyes glinting behind heavy-rimmed spectacles. The area alongside the M25, between Enfield Lock and High Beach, Epping Forest, carries another echo of ...”

“... Exploding Plastic Inevitable, which had various incarnations between January 1966 and its first broad public invitation in April, each of which also involved some combination of Warhol’s dancing fools, slide-projector gels, light shows, silent films and chaos. (Warhol took first billing in all advertisements, above the Velvets, though presumably he just ...”

“... cataract and glade, for long drifting walks through the night, as when Dorothy Wordsworth and William and Coleridge set out to watch the moon rise over the Severn. The association with the country as an authentic native place, defined by appealing local idiosyncrasies, becomes key to the word’s peregrinations. The literary scholar Kathryn Sutherland ...”

“... tragical-historical, tragical-comical-historical-pastoral’. On the tomb of the merchant William Bond (d.1576) in St Helen’s, Bishopsgate, Latin verses describe Bond as a greater merchant than Jason of the golden fleece; in The Merchant of Venice Gratiano declares: ‘We are the Jasons, we have won the fleece.’ The last chapter, on ...”

“... time he deals almost too fully with the troubles of Eliot’s first marriage (compared, say, with William Empson’s very different, idiosyncratic but suggestive analysis of the filial Eliot at the period of The Waste Land) in no way affects this position. Hastings, too, takes as his subject the private life and yet gives us, as both condition and ...”

“... of me, and my geometry, during the journey there – It would have puzzled Euclid … How big and broad the aisle seemed, full huge enough before, as I quaked slowly up – and reached my usual seat! … [I] got out of church quite comfortably. Several roared around, and, sought to devour me … until our gate was reached. I needn’t tell you, Susie, just ...”

“... get more for himself. He knew and admired Hastings, and was a friend of the great orientalist Sir William Jones, scholar of Persian and Sanskrit, and, as Mr Jones, a member of the Club, present at Boswell’s election. When Johnson first wrote to Hastings on 30 March 1774, recommending to him the future Sir Robert Chambers, one of his Majesty’s Judges in ...”

“... almost none of the indirect taxation of necessities common elsewhere. The consequence was a broad diffusion of prosperity, which is not to deny the existence at times of deprivation and want among the not inconsiderable numbers of the very poor. There have been efforts, not very successful, to measure the general standard of living of different ...”

“... the torrid sheet in purple. Her face, also in shadow, is almost featureless – there are two broad strokes of mauve across her cheekbones, like sticking plasters. I can’t convey the subtlety of the colouring (nor can a reproduction). But I can insist on the delicacy and variety of the dipping brushstrokes, on how softened and edgeless everything is: a ...”

“... performing was both a parody and the real thing. Doesn’t the entrance qualification seem rather broad, though? By the end of the 1980s ‘men who had lost lovers, friends or members of their local community to Aids’ was a description of every gay man in America. This is certainly a richer appropriation of widow status than the sentimental claiming of the ...”

“... machine broke down.The man who improved on the vacuum tube was the London-born American physicist William Shockley. After the war, Shockley was employed at Bell Labs, the research branch of the US telephone monopoly, AT&T. He realised that certain chemical elements could perform a similar function of encoding and transmitting 1s and 0s. Conducting materials ...”