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“... the smell found them, the smell and the uproar of flesh learning its mortality.’ There is frank talk of ‘preacherly drivel’ and a fine description of Queen Victoria as the ‘much-beloved though humourless dumpling of legend’. An American couple, surprised to find themselves hopelessly in love, are said to be ‘both so easily ridden in on by ...”

“... bourgeois or worse. It must have been rather as if Ivan Karamazov had suddenly materialised in the close at Barchester. No doubt Wittgenstein’s father, Karl, an Austrian steel magnate, bore some responsibility for the relentless soul-searching, the sense of sin and the pervasive unhappiness that beset his youngest son – and indeed nearly all his sons, for ...”

“... day, he remembers something he didn’t actually get to see: the ground is ‘where I once missed Frank Woolley just out when I arrived having made something like 70 in half an hour’. Others send birthday greetings, only to be trumped by the recipient: ‘The day doesn’t bother me. Just another. No better no worse. But the avalanche is appalling.’ Or ...”

“... in one volume … whose mysteries not even himself could read’. The coffin, a writing surface close to death, is the only object to survive the Pequod’s wreck. It serves as a lifeboat to convey Ishmael to safety – which, given that Ishmael is our narrator, makes it a device that delivers to us the entire content of the novel. It’s a literal ...”

“... it was just a secretarial mistake that she had been flown out to Los Angeles. I don’t think many close to the action doubted that Hawks intended to take her to bed. He ended up putting her under a personal service contract, changed her first name to Lauren, and ordered her to bring her voice and her gaze down. Hawks liked sophisticated women who could flirt ...”

“... its incorporation of stray materials, the personal touch on the elbow that the American poet Frank Bidart, a close friend and associate of Lowell’s, ‘both amanuensis and sounding-board’ for the many books of sonnets, has brought to it. (A no doubt garbled account once reached me of Lowell flying Bidart across the ...”

“... how to fend these off while yet remaining in a dialogue. And as with patients, so with Freud, Very close became too close. They challenged each other: Jung believed Freud was having an affair with his sister-in-law, and that the triangle was skewing Freud’s theories. Freud took a closer look at Jung’s dream of his ...”

“... cases came from knowing how to interpret the evidence. Angleton’s fascination with the power of close reading began when he was a student at Yale in the late 1930s in the era of I.A. Richards and the New Criticism, which held that the meaning of a poem came from the poem itself, and was completely independent of the history of the poet. Indeed, it was ...”

“... piece of cast-iron in Plaça del Rei, or Lichtenstein’s colourful, brash, cartoon-like sculpture close to the waterfront, or Subirachs’s literal-minded and awkward-looking monument to President Macià in Plaça de Catalunya, or Botero’s silly cat on Rambla del Raval, or some of the other more playful adornments on the beach in Barceloneta, ...”

“... Carlo and when it was clear that Queensberry was in possession of compromising letters, Wilde met Frank Harris and George Bernard Shaw at the Café Royal. When Harris vehemently sought to persuade him to drop the case and leave the country and Shaw agreed, Wilde seemed to be coming around to their view. (‘You are sure to lose it,’ Harris told him. ‘You ...”

“... entering the mainstream of American life.Bell’s biography is an unusual book, written by a ‘close friend’ (in Bell’s words) and divided into eight parts, named for Stone’s eight novels. Each part relates the genesis, the false starts, the tortured progress, the ordeal of finishing, and the critical and commercial fate of the novels as they ...”

“... have noticed that when you express a feeling, it is on the point of disappearing.’ This comes as close as anything to defining the uncertainty principle that inhabits Constant’s perpetual self-analysis: when you locate its object, the object appears to vanish. The repeated fantasies of escape recorded in Constant’s diary acquire a more affirmative aspect ...”

“... her and Mr Knightley from settling at Donwell, about two years; and that the letters placed by Frank Churchill before Jane Fairfax, which she swept away unread, contained the word ‘pardon’. Of the good people in Northanger Abbey and Persuasion we know nothing more than what is written; for before those works were published their author had been taken ...”

“... up to and including testing, without having a human spy to witness it and tell us about it. He is frank about the numerous instances in which the whole detection apparatus failed, as it did in the first Soviet test of August 1949; the ‘Vela’ explosion in the South Atlantic in September 1979; the detonation by India of several devices, one ...”

“... as their criticisms are, I can’t go along with the ferocity of Ford’s detractors (they seem to close their eyes to watch his films), but David Thomson makes a mighty-seeming case against him in his Biographical Dictionary of the Cinema. From the 1975 edition: Ford’s male chauvinism believes in uniforms, drunken candour, fresh-faced little women (though ...”