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“... movement of Schubert’s E Flat Piano Trio of the unpleasant emotional atmosphere of Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon. And, of course, the bonding process works even more powerfully in reverse: music lends its expressiveness to the world. Once you know Britten’s setting of Hardy’s ‘At Day-Close in November’ you will never again be able to read the poem ...”

“... home in pursuit of a rival. The day before, Ashley Dale, who was 28, had been shot at her home two miles away. She was dead because her boyfriend hadn’t been there: he owed money to her killers. It was a bad year for women and girls on Merseyside: they were treated repeatedly as collateral damage, dying when they got between men and their targets.It can ...”

“... in 1970 or 1971, it was easy for me, aged 15 or 16, to get permission to hitchhike the twenty miles to see it. I don’t think I had ever seen a painting before, or a piece of sculpture. In 1971 there was work there in my school holidays. I held a light from the wings on a production of Murder in the Cathedral. I remember vividly shining it on the ...”

“... from out of state. A majority of hands went up: these were evangelical Christians who had come for miles to see one of their movement’s political celebrities make a rare New England appearance. They had driven north from Nantucket and Providence, south from Bangor, and east from Albany, and they were opposed to abortion above all. Cruz is renowned as a ...”

“... beneath. In the parade along 5th Avenue they carried banner portraits of Sean McDermott, Kevin Barry and, no doubt, other martyrs. I didn’t stay long because the wind was bitter, the pavement covered in slush and my bones frozen to the marrow. These parades make the Americans look like imbeciles. But, the first page: I wrote it twice, satisfactory ...”

“... the Canadian ambassador to quiz the two men in Jordanian custody – ‘Shawn Kendall’ and ‘Barry Beads’ – on their ‘Canadian-ness’. It didn’t take long for them to be exposed as impostors. ‘We did it . . . We sprayed him with a chemical,’ Yatom confessed to Batikhi after landing in Jordan: ‘There’s nothing you can do about it ...”

“... his Canaletto at Christie’s he paid the £10 million bill by Access in order to earn the air miles – enough presumably to last him till the end of his days. Such lacing of extravagance with prudence has since become so common that Christie’s have now suspended credit card payments altogether.6 January, Yorkshire. Ring Mr Redhead, the coal-merchant at ...”

“... statistics. In 18 days the engineers and fifteen thousand other friendlies had cleared four square miles of forest, blown up 2500 bunkers and tunnels, evacuated 5987 inhabitants and burned every ‘structure’ standing above ground, for the loss of 72 Americans and 11 ARVN. What had taken the Vietminh and then the Vietcong 20 years to build had been destroyed ...”

“... cadet training unit at Heysham, every Wednesday or Thursday night we would walk the two or three miles into Morecambe, and go to the dance in the Floral Hall. From about eight to midnight, several hundred men and women, nearly all in uniform, were packed in under a pink and gold dome, and wandered round in a haze, searching for a partner. I danced badly, and ...”

“... is a massively ugly parody-arch in the middle of nowhere. You see it coming up on the horizon from miles away. (‘The majestic Memorial to the Missing,’ says Miss Coombs, ‘stands amid fields still scarred with the trench lines of the Leipzig Redoubt.’) Blakey would call it fugly. Loads of Castles among the 73,000-or-so incised names, though nobody known ...”

“... is paired with Phyllis (Pearsall), the artist who claimed to have tramped three thousand miles in mapping streets for the A-Z. The most recent partnership, Jessica (Ennis) and Ellie (Simmonds), were christened, as might be expected, after Olympic and Paralympic athletes. Fracking is the latest wheeze, another US import. When I visited the poet Gary ...”

“... of the type we are living through now – much of Northern Europe was buried beneath miles of ice. Sea levels were hundreds of feet lower than they are today, and there was a thousand-mile-wide land bridge between Russia and North America. According to some palaeo-climatologists, 700 million years ago, during a period known as the Varangian (for ...”

“... but he claims it also marked the declaration of independence of another ‘empire’ two thousand miles away – the Lakota Sioux. A former farming people from the Missouri River valley, the Lakota had started a series of explorations of the northern central plains in the early 1770s. ‘It was,’ Hämäläinen writes, ‘North America’s first sustained ...”

“... but never mind, I was introduced to this young man who when he opened his mouth sounded like that Barry Humphries character, you know, the Cultural Attaché to the Court of St James’s, so I knew he was Australian for a start, and when I asked him what he did he said he was a Qantas airline steward, and when I asked his name he said it was Tony ...”

“... vista’ had opened up: where was it going to take us? A distance of four thousand miles and an absence from home of several months can do funny things to one’s sense of perspective. Reading the cuts in a provincial town in a small Latin American country, it was easy to get carried away. It seemed to me then that the impossible had happened ...”