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“... the sea and was designed by White, with fountains and statues, formal hedges, arbours, colonnades, stone benches, rows of potted orange trees and a windmill. White’s origins were comparatively humble, but the families he and his son married into were upper-crust and rich. They had sailboats and horses and tennis courts and picnics – every ingredient for ...”

“... turn of his intellectual pursuits and his habit of divination has gained him a reputation as the Harry Potter of Ancient Rome (figulus is Latin for ‘potter’).The late Republic was a period of intense cultural production as well as political turmoil. ‘These so learned times’, as Cicero described them, produced an unprecedented number of works on ...”

“... College London are dominated by a bedsheet banner proclaiming its occupation and the grey stone is scrawled with coloured chalk: ‘Cut Out Cuts: Don’t Con-Dem Me!’ Inside, the campus has supposedly been put on lockdown. Guards in yellow jackets sit by hastily produced signs announcing ID checks. The students have their own security detail ...”

“... as cinematographer, the American Ry Cooder as composer/performer of the music; the American actors Harry Dean Stanton and Dean Stockwell as the central Henderson brothers, the French Aurore Clément and the German Nastassia Kinski as their wives. For Wenders, a long-time lover of the Western and of American rock music, it was, as he has since told the French ...”

“... daughter, in the person of the macho, surgical-alcohol-swigging doctor who treats him for a kidney stone. As one of his many book titles proclaims, Yevtushenko is ‘of Siberian stock’. But he is also the Soviet Union’s most internationally famous writer. Wild Berries’ meandering narrative allows him a few (immodest) reflections on the making of his own ...”

“... fictional engineering was never designed to work on mocking readers in the first place, but on the Harry Potter-primed ‘young adult’ market, full of girls longing for sex and scared rigid by the very thought. To whom, it seems, Edward is like a dream – he’s so clean and fragrant, for one thing. Meyer’s vampires neither eat nor sleep nor breathe, nor ...”

“... to repulse the other hand. Even Hofmannsthal’s bottom came in for commentary, from the diarist Harry Kessler, who used to notice such things; unkindly and anti-semitically, he observed ‘its levantine tendency to breadth’. Given a person of such acute, so to speak, personal interest (despite the Broch-delighting ‘suppression of self’), one of the ...”

“... in gung-ho exercises. A design for the Canadian Estate at Bulford. Two birds with one stone: the A303 should be diverted north just west of Parkhouse crossroads (the site of the Battle of the Beanfield in 1985, when police from Wiltshire and five adjacent sties plus troops in porcine disguise ambushed and assaulted New Age travellers en route to ...”

“... There, Not Sidney is embraced by Elizabeth Taylor; Sidney Poitier’s friend and rival Harry Belafonte kisses Not Sidney on the cheek. ‘Was I Not Sidney Poitier or was I not Sidney Poitier,’ he wonders, but the distinction’s become meaningless; the ‘special award for Most Dignified Figure in American Culture’ is announced, and Not Sidney ...”

“... with Oriental rugs, pictures, archaeological treasures and with my own sculpture.’ I noticed a stone balcony right above my head that had somehow escaped damage. It was from one of these balconies that Jackie, Philby’s pet fox, fell to its death. He suspected the housekeeper of pushing it off the ledge: she was known to dislike it. For a man who betrayed ...”

“... Sunday, but without the article it conveys little meaning. The intra-office memo from myself to Harry Evans, then editor of the Sunday Times, and other colleagues at the outstanding paper for which both Derek Humphry and I then worked, has never been published before. At a minimum, the two documents add to the historic record.On the night of 30 January ...”

“... what his job has led him to expect. Yorkshire, 15 March. Having seen there was a Bronze Age stone circle (more accurately the remains of a barrow) at Yockenthwaite I look at the map and see what I take to be a narrow and presumably little-used road over from Hawes. It’s a spectacular day with deep snowdrifts still on the tops where we stop to look at ...”

“... meet anyone anywhere to say Ive behaved badly, I think Ive acted as right as any other tom-dick-or-harry who might be keeping company with you [aussi onnaitement que lepremier garconvenu qui pourrate frequente] but I wont say anything about that forthemoment. Célestine’s next letter was from a schoolmaster called Allorent, in copperplate handwriting and a ...”

“... Secret negotiations had apparently been going on for two years between five institutions: the Harry Ransom Research Center at Austin, Texas, the University of Southern California, UCLA, New York Public Library and the Huntington. Three of the (alleged) competitors were within a thirty-mile radius of Isherwood’s home in Santa Monica. The Ransom Center ...”

“... up, Jane Eyre learns about her lost mother and father, and draws strength from them; so too does Harry Potter. Popular fictions concede the power of inheritance even as they glamorise the courage of orphans. For those without an aristocratic pedigree, family piety used to amount to little more than anecdotes about half-remembered relatives. Now anyone with a ...”