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“... So many lies have been told about Liszt that the main objective must be to set the record straight. Walker doesn’t even scrutinise Liszt’s belief in the Weihekuss and he finds the whole business about Don Juan ‘pathological’. According to Walker, Liszt only ever had sex with three women, all of them married to other men: Countess Marie ...”

“... it was entirely in character that on her husband’s becoming Prelate of the Order of St Michael and St George she adopted the style of an (honorary) knight’s wife, though she had no right to it – was not wise in the management of a tough little boy and systematically denied him any display of love at all. Her own fortunes in love had been ...”

“... is a self-proclaimed Sapphist. In one chapter of this book Gingrich calls with an apparently straight face for abstention from pre-marital sex. But could anyone except an amoral child of the counter-culture have pulled off the ‘Republican revolution’? The requirements of partisanship probably have a lot to do with this apparent contradiction. As ...”

“... adventurer you cannot just browse through their journals, notes and maps. You have to look them straight in the face’ – first removing any six-inch moths – ‘to find out why they have made the hard choice between reading about adventure or living it.’ But the steaming rank animal of the armchair has the drop on people like Pelton Young: we are more ...”

“... 85 per cent of their trade in dollars.In Trade Wars Are Class Wars (2020), Matthew Klein and Michael Pettis showed that the US functions as the world’s importer of last resort – absorbing the trade surpluses of Europe and China – and that the American working class pays the price. But they didn’t discuss the power that accrues to the US through ...”

“... in secondary schools and then at Queen’s; his literary life with Seamus Deane, Derek Mahon, Michael and Edna Longley, Philip Hobsbaum, and the workshop that Hobsbaum convened, the Group; and the grisly metamorphoses of Northern Irish public life, from simmering inequality and half-suppressed resentment into the worst of the Troubles. Each of these ...”

“... at the highest level and engage with the best scientific minds of her generation, Mary Somerville, Michael Faraday, William Whewell and Charles Babbage among them. The passion for numbers and experiments was inherited from Annabella, who was christened by Byron on one of their happier days ‘Princess of Parallelograms’, but in Ada it was shot through with ...”

“... a bibliography. He is what he watches, late at night. Charles Hawtrey, in his youthful pomp, in Michael Powell’s A Canterbury Tale. Hawtrey (pre-booze) with Will Hay. James Fox’s strangulated Elephant and Castle in Performance. Hitchcock’s expressionist version of The Thirty-Nine Steps. Seabrook’s work, before the wonderful accident of All the ...”

“... in cold rain, where you could not see the sunset. Caleb’s toes emerged out of the mud in a row, straight as piano keys, his feet together, his weight evenly balanced. Although his testicles were hanging free, where you would have expected to see a penis there was a thin six-inch tube of brittle gourd sticking vertically into the air. A string tied round his ...”

“... to be funny. I suppose otherwise they’d never laugh at all. In their biography The Real Romney, Michael Kranish and Scott Helman write that ‘within the family, Romney’s zany side was well known.’* They give two examples: Romney assuming ‘the voices of cartoon characters’ in letters home from Bordeaux, where he was a missionary in the late ...”

“... and Nagasaki, various sites in the Australian desert (hence the title of the 1988 film by Michael Pattinson and Bruce Myles), in Nevada or Siberia, in the Gobi desert, in the South Pacific. The terrorist attack is thus assimilated to the many instances of nuclear explosions, all caused by nation-states and many caused by ‘us’ and people on ‘our ...”

“... enclosure, perhaps the kailyard where the inhabitants grew their greens; a landing-place where two straight lines of boulders run out into the sea; a burn for fresh water. A substantial ruin with sharp (i.e. modern) corners must be the inn identified by Donald and Jill MacLean, whose papers I’ve been reading in the cultural centre nearby in Kildonan: ‘A ...”

“... minorities – no Jews, no Poles, no Italians – and had nominated only one other, the hapless Michael Dukakis. But this was the response of a baby boomer, when in fact one of the remarkable things about the Obama campaign was that it wasn’t about race at all. Obama, though he studiously copied his speaking style from King and other preachers, was not ...”

“... and waistcoat, Mam in her shiny straw hat, both of them never able to keep their faces straight when being photographed. In the back garden butterflies cluster on the buddleia, mostly red admirals which look black from behind, with the cabbage whites preferring the catmint.Good remark by Francis Bacon: ‘No point in being both old and shy.’7 ...”

“... had to anchor at Havre Gosselin instead, which meant mounting a precarious fifty-step ladder straight up the rocks: a proper jetty was built only in 1912. Walkers could access one of the best beaches, at Port es Saies, by means of a rope hanging over the cliff.Victorians and Edwardians who took this sort of thing in their stride made Sark a tourist ...”