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“... Son. Gypsy and Me absolutely had to be written, ostensibly as a tribute to a remarkable woman, but more importantly as a way of resolving a near-mortal conflict. That conflict consisted of nothing so banal as simple hostility. The author is 12 as his tale begins, and he implies that until this stage the relationship has been agreeably harmonious. He introduces ...”

“... of the United States of America. As the novel opens, he’s really up against it. The time is more or less now – or, to be precise, five days this spring. The action begins on Thursday, 10 May. The president is testifying before a congressional select committee whose members demand to know why he’s been making clandestine phone calls to the world’s ...”

“... let her out), Daisy Fellowes (her face lifted for the fourth time – the Doctors say no more), then Cecil [Beaton] and John Gielgud came to stay with us, and we went to Venice on Arturo Lopez’s yacht … Oh yes, I forgot Noel Coward – he fell in love with Jack. Jack hated it All. Later, in his thirties, he would tire also of the Greeks: ‘The ...”

“... deserved) reputation for being hilarious is that audiences strongly expect it to make them laugh. More than that: they know it will make them laugh. The curtain at the Piccadilly Theatre went up to reveal ‘an open-plan living area, with a staircase leading to a gallery. A notable feature is the extensive range of entrances and exits provided … All in ...”

“... never definitively resolved: Lucy’s views veer between trust and suspicion, and the reader’s more or less follow. It’s not, ultimately, very important: Raban isn’t the first person to have observed that all autobiography is to some extent a species of fiction, as much as all fiction is, from one point of view, a variety of autobiography. Even if the ...”

“... feet of his dead twin brother’s corpse. That makes the passage from Homer instantly something more than a translation: ‘Patroclus, dear brother, I shall do as you ask: I’ll see to the arrangements for your funeral. But Come closer now, for a moment let us embrace And wail in excruciating lamentation.’ He reached out but he couldn’t get hold of ...”

“... actor. In a sluggish movie we keep looking at our watch and it seems to have stopped. Paul Thomas Anderson’s Inherent Vice is more slow than sluggish but pretty sluggish all the same. Anderson wrote the adaptation himself and clearly loves the 2009 Thomas Pynchon novel he is ...”

“... Nash’s Olden Time as the late Tudor and early Stuart period, though he could have said more about the long literary tradition of ‘Old English hospitality’, which generated the Victorian lithographs. It originated with the nostalgia of Elizabethan Catholics for the dissolved monasteries; it continued with Jacobean laments about the gentry ...”

“... Interior of the Colony. Skyscraper cliffs keep this green garden dark. The Obelisk is sandstone. Thomas Mort Is also present, bronze on a tall plinth – His plain Victorian three-piece suit bulks large, Befitting Sydney’s first successful exporter Of refrigerated foods – while, lower down This plush declivity, one finds a bubbler Superfluously shaded by ...”

“... a series of books published nearly thirty years ago by Hugh Trevor-Roper, Alan Macfarlane, Keith Thomas and Erik Midelfort. Until very recently, however, it was the history of trials on the Continent alone that seemed a lively subject, and in 1996 Diane Purkiss could still properly complain of ‘the torpor of English witchcraft studies’. It was as if ...”

“... both rights and reason are under several kinds of open and covert attack, the life and writing of Thomas Paine will always be part of the arsenal on which we shall need to depend.’ In the event, between the dedication and the final sentence the book says nothing about Iraq or the war on terror, perhaps in silent acknowledgment of the difficulty of knowing ...”

“... to come out of 18th-century Newburyport, Massachusetts was the lengthy autobiography of one of its more colourful citizens, which did not contain a single full stop. Instead, the author provided the reader with a generous assortment of punctuation marks in an appendix, along with an invitation to ‘add salt and pepper as you please.’ In a 1936 ...”

“... Before explaining why Stroud believes that this is not the case, let me describe the view more fully. The new science of the 17th century was brought into existence when Galileo and Newton developed a quantitative geometrical understanding of the physical world and the laws governing it, a description that left out the familiar qualitative aspects of ...”

“... a transgression-heavy sense of the book trade: a life of quiet, steady work leaves little trace. More visible are the pewterer and shoemaker who were whipped ‘arse naked’ while tied to a cart being drawn through the City’s marketplaces in April 1545. Papers pinned to the cart declared their offence in ‘castynge abrode … certeyn sedicious bylles ...”

“... reach is not to survive. In these pictures the faces of the living, helpless and hopeless, are more disturbing than the bodies of the dead. ‘I would rather be tied to the soil as another man’s serf, even a poor man’s, who hadn’t much to live on himself, than be King of all these the dead and destroyed.’ Homer’s words might have been written for ...”