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“... sharp-cut, well-complexioned face, with thin white hair and white Edwardian moustache and dark black eyebrows. In profile the head is remarkably elongated at the back. He wore a very dark-grey suit, with stiff upstanding collar folded right round the throat, and long stiff cuffs. He spoke for seventy minutes, and the applause at the end was fervent and ...”

“... in the woods. As I ate them, I thought of opossums and birds, and the antique Japanese prints in black and white, in which monkeys are eating persimmons in bare trees.’ To his young Cuban poet friend José Rodríguez Feo, for whom, admittedly, he played down the Puritan, he seemed not quite American (or at least not your average norteamericano): ‘To the ...”

“... tepid, stanked saltwater smells. The willows shimmy in the wind. Where else, As slugs crawl up, black gland on glistening gland, The moon-sharp hedge, could such a dumping ground, So gloom-engorged a cemetery be found? O strange girl-shadow, green and delicate, Pale green, a mouldering of the atmosphere, For what wan purpose are you wandered here, Who are ...”

“... In front of it at the Whitechapel is a circular glass case/ conference table, surrounded by black leather chairs. Among the archive material displayed is a picture of Clement Attlee speaking with Guernica behind him – the display of the picture in 1939 was organised in collaboration with the Stepney Trade Union Council. In the gallery alongside a new ...”

“... the valley below the station, is one of the best and most original of all Victorian churches. St Michael and All Angels is almost as impressive. It has a complicated building history: Bodley was responsible for the first church of 1858, Burges designed the additions which were completed by 1893. Its high, black and red ...”

“... War of Independence, his grandmother Phebe remembered that day differently. She had fainted when a Black man burst, axe in hand, into her bedroom: it was Frank, their loyal slave, warning her that the redcoats were on the way.Perhaps it was not just a distaste for activists but what he described to an acquaintance as his ‘mild natural colourphobia’ that ...”

“... as an MP he would have been a disaster. His vision of human nature is utterly two-dimensional and black-and-white, and his political opinions are dogmatically prescriptive – with an arrogance that only the wholly immature or innocent ever dare show. His world is full of goodies and baddies. The goodies spend all their time in the ‘forefront of community ...”

“... savage gueulade he told the Goncourt brothers he felt he was going to spit blood. But why then, Michael Fried asks, is Madame Bovary positively teeming with assonances, alliterations and repetitions? How is it that after the acid bath of the gueuloir the novel is ‘shot through with precisely the sorts of phonemic effects Flaubert claimed he wished to ...”

“... succession of events that fed into one another until the final collapse. In When Life Nearly Died, Michael Benton, a palaeontologist, describes the decades of research that led to the current consensus about what happened, and argues against an extraterrestrial cause for the catastrophe. It is astonishing that scientists have acknowledged the existence of this ...”

“... beyond the limits of permissible displeasure. And so, in his own way, does the Austrian filmmaker Michael Haneke. Funny Games (1997) is a violent melodrama about a respectable family set upon by nasty criminals, much as in The Desperate Hours (1955) or Cape Fear (1962). (Both films were remade in the 1990s, by ...”

“... sense of themselves as individuals and as a nation. ‘Every man in the street, white, black, red or yellow,’ the statesman Ralph Bunche wrote in 1940, ‘knows that this is “the land of the free” … [and] the cradle of liberty.’ Cowie’s account builds on Tyler E. Stovall’s recent book White Freedom, which argued that the ...”

“... Ian Watt’s The Rise of the Novel,* which Michael McKeon energetically bids to transcend, gave us, whatever else, the clear image and serviceable concept: ‘formal realism’, the growth of ‘the middle class’, secularised Protestant Man proudly bearing the standard of an aggressive ‘individualism’ – on Crusoe’s hard-won island as in the socioeconomic landscape of contemporary England ...”

“... of the man who had harried and harassed her husband and snubbed her. The Spearses had a son, Michael, a permanent invalid, and, at this time, an undergraduate at Oxford. At Christmas 1939, his plans having gone wrong, de Gaulle was welcomed at the Spears home in Berkshire. He and Michael Spears had a long talk, just ...”

“... in the form of an objective, linear chronicle, cannot turn these omissions to narrative advantage. Michael Davenport in Young Hearts Crying has been a successful amateur boxer and a waist-gunner in B-17s during the bombing of Germany. Later on he writes what is said to be one of the finest contemporary American poems, ‘Coming Clean’, and later still he ...”

“... saying it would do about Murdoch. Apropos the price war, I know someone who sat next to Conrad Black at dinner while it was going on. The Telegraph was one of the price war’s principal targets. (‘Don’t worry about the Telegraph,’ Murdoch told Sir David English of Associated Newspapers in 1993. ‘Leave them to me. I’ll put them out of business ...”