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“... the corner of the room. So Plimpton fills 31 pages with talk of the night of Truman’s Black and White Ball, but only 24 pages with his entire childhood. (This is a less happy Boswellian trait.) The party method favours the party-goers, and you’d be better off in the company of Gerald Clarke’s biography, published ten years ago, if you wanted to know ...”

“... as yet entirely unthreatening. Soon afterwards, he landed the part of the largest dwarf in Snow White at school. We don’t know if he stole the show. It was only when his father forced him into a tedious job in Vienna’s Anglo-Austrian bank that he caught the acting bug. He got himself sacked for wiggling his ears at his boss, a story he later ...”

“... on by crop failures (Ireland, in the famine years of the 1840s, suffered what the historian Joel Mokyr describes as ‘the greatest natural demographic disaster of modern European history’). The silk weavers of Lyon fought a series of bloody battles against the army, which began as resistance to wage cuts, but in 1834 culminated in political calls for ...”

“... thousands of books in his Kremlin apartment and at his dacha in Kuntsevo. There was émigré, White Guard literature, and there were works by old acquaintances whom he had killed: Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Bukharin. Their books, confiscated everywhere else in the country, lived on in his library. In the Khrushchev period the library was broken up, and ...”

“... in the grave when Todd made a bid to edit her poems and ride to literary notoriety on Emily’s white apron strings. So the story goes – or a version of it.Dickinson’s work first appeared in 1890 in a volume co-edited by Todd and Thomas Wentworth Higginson. Julie Dobrow’s After Emily attempts to rescue Todd’s reputation by offsetting her bad ...”

“... floor of the chancel is set with encaustic tiles with designs in red, brown, pale green, white and rich Wedgwood blue.’ Mass was said in this sumptuous building in 1846 and work continued on the cathedral for the next few years.It seems incongruous now, barely possible that this wealth of detail was being incorporated into an Irish Catholic ...”