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“... bud by the fortuitous retirement of one justice followed by the death of another. In appointing John Roberts and Samuel Alito, Bush elevated to the court two jurists with track records of giving the executive branch a wide berth on matters relating to national security. (Once on the court, justices don’t always perform as expected; whether the Roberts ...”

“... well-run European city in the dawn of the 21st century.’ Coetzee also uses Costello’s son, John, who often accompanies her, as a foil. He slumps in the auditorium, worrying that his mother is rambling or sermonising. Is this Coetzee protecting himself by pre-empting criticism? The technique of fiction within fiction is much more complicated than the ...”

“... witness will come as little surprise to anyone who has read Peter Singer, Michael Pollan, Felicity Lawrence, Eric Schlosser or any of the previous exposés of factory-farmed meat, but they make grim and startling reading even so. If you can get beyond the title, the great virtues of Farmageddon are its global reach and eyewitness accounts of the many grotesque ...”

“... the operator couldn’t find a record of a patient named Henrietta Lacks in the hospital, Lawrence hung up and didn’t know who else to call.’ A few months later, the information that Lacks was ‘part alive’ reached another member of the family. This second contact came about as a result of yet another twist in the HeLa saga. It had become ...”

“... be altered to follow not what actually happened, but what ought to have done. Surely (in Ragtime) John Pierpont Morgan might have invited Henry Ford to lunch to talk about reincarnation; and why wouldn’t the anarchist Emma Goldman have given a full-body massage to the society divorcée Evelyn Nesbit (accompanied by a lecture on sexual politics)? These lines ...”

“... enhance sexual encounters without degrading or demeaning any partner to them. Quotations from Lawrence, Joyce, the pseudonymous Laurence St Clair, Alan Hollinghurst and others, and Nussbaum’s extended commentary on them, provide ample opportunity (not taken advantage of) to have index entries for ‘cocks, soaping of in ...”

“... captive by Iraqis, the chances were high that he would be raped. (One presumes nobody told T.E. Lawrence to ‘remember that in 75 per cent of cases when you are male-raped, you will get an erection or ejaculate. Do not worry about that . . . it does not mean that you are gay.’) In September 2003 he touched down in Basra, where he was frantically ...”

“... that painters would have anything left to say about the observable world. It was only while in John Grierson’s employment – collaborating with Auden, Humphrey Jennings and Britten – that Coldstream rediscovered a private, ‘regressive’ zest for painting, working out of hours on ‘a craze for doing heads and faces’. Whatever rationale could be ...”

“... major source for Stourton is Clark’s letters to Janet Stone, wife of the wood engraver Lawrence Stone, kept under embargo in the Bodleian but available to Stourton in the form of transcripts made before they were consigned to the library. Clark’s true feelings are more likely to be found here than anywhere else. Stourton admits to a shudder on ...”

“... and shortly afterwards he did. Spender told the story of this first interview over and over again: John Sutherland, his biographer, calculates that he repeated it at least six times in print and uncountable times in lectures and talks and interviews, as well as in conversation. Spender would come to resent Auden’s tendency always to think of him as he had ...”

“... out; and because it isn’t just a matter of time before you get it – as is the case, say, with John Ashbery – you can’t get much literary criticism out of a Thomas poem. (Nothing reveals the banality of paraphrase more than a commentary on one of his poems; his best critics – Empson, Lowell, MacNeice – are inclined to say that they don’t know ...”

“... forehead at the front, the flukes at the back – and even in the middle. Melville tells us that John D’Wolf, one of his uncles, was in charge of a ship raised clean out of the water by a whale slipping beneath it and then ‘setting up its back’. During his time on the Essex, Owen Chase had a similar experience in one of the ship’s boats, when a whale ...”

“... about middle-aged women suffering. They were Moore’s The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne (1955), John McGahern’s The Barracks (1961) and Aidan Higgins’s Langrishe, Go Down (1966). It is no coincidence, either, that the best novels about men in the period after independence dealt with figures in extreme and exquisite isolation, as in the novels of Beckett ...”

“... curator of the museum – the ‘Wonder House’. The curator is a tribute to Kipling’s father, John Lockwood Kipling, who moved to Bombay as curator of the J.J. School of Art in 1865, the year of Kipling’s birth. But through the figure of the curator, Kipling also indirectly acknowledges the existence of a colonial India of intellectual collaboration ...”

“... As Kathleen Tidrick shows, the ‘evangelical cult of personal example’ developed by the Lawrence brothers in the Punjab, with whom her study starts, was from its earliest phase capable of expansion to accommodate successful oddball adventurers. Of the young men who ‘pacified’ the Punjab in the late 1840s, ...”