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“... mother in Libra: ‘that was the end of the only happy part of my adult life. It is Marguerite and Lee ever since. We are a mother and son. It has never been a question of neglect.’ The neighbour is recycling clichés she’s learned from newspapers and the TV news. Passing the police, the runner learns that the abduction was quite random; the man didn’t ...”

“... lengthy biographies in English. Jung Chang and Jon Halliday’s is the longest, having overtaken Philip Short’s Mao (1999) and Li Zhisui’s The Private Life of Chairman Mao (1995). It represents an extraordinary research effort. The authors have been working on the project since at least 1986, to judge by the date of the earliest interview cited, which ...”

“... life he knew in the weird Brooklyn establishment presided over by Auden, and shared by Gipsy Rose Lee, Carson McCullers and other irregulars, was fun in a way but far from comfy. He hated the mess, preferring the comforts and cossetings he got at Mrs Mayer’s house on Long Island. ‘I can’t live wildly and work!’ His mother’s discipline, confirming ...”

“... thought: ‘I was sick and tired of everything/When I called you last night.’ And I was reading Philip Larkin, where he says about nothing like something happening anywhere. The next Saturday it was West Brom at home. Puppy love, pop tunes, A-level poetry, crap soccer. This seems to be the recipe. Old soccer bores don’t really stand a chance. Even so, it ...”

“... 1962’, in which a girl taking off her clothes at a bus-stop is suffering from the ‘Gypsy Rose [Lee] virus’. Although Davis strings us along for a page, this bit is from a 1952 Robert Heinlein novella. One hundred million house mice did indeed overrun the Southern Californian town of Taft in 1926, and the picture of ‘Federal men killing mice’ with ...”

“... to the point of torturing and killing others. In 1971, the Stanford prison experiment, set up by Philip Zimbardo to study the interactions of students assigned the roles of prisoners and guards, had to be stopped after six days as the guards’ behaviour became more and more brutal and the prisoners became more and more vulnerable and traumatised. Given such ...”

“... the Short Strand – provide the matter of sectarian conflict, for, as the acerbic historian Joe Lee lamented, Ulster has a ‘dearth of major atheist settlements’. Geography also presents challenges on a larger scale. The incomer from ‘GB’, as Ulster folk call Great Britain, quickly learns not to call the nearby larger island ‘the mainland’, while ...”

“... into the pool, hurting his back.’ The brace would keep the President upright for the bullets of Lee Harvey Oswald.Makes you wonder about the lighter side of Camelot. Here, at any event, is a suggestive minor-key connection between hubris and nemesis – or between Kennedy’s frantically sordid private life and the events that punctuated and then terminated ...”

“... million steps I took, I felt much better for.     Sweating up heights, and resting in their lee,     I saw, at least, some things I’d hoped to see: Loose crystals winking on a snowfield, like a Sheet of marble, picked out with glittering mica. I saw, on cliffs a thousand feet or higher,     The perching young of seabirds feed and fatten. Their ...”

“... the sketch which works is often more striking than anything finished – the portrait of Vernon Lee which Sargent threw off in a couple of hours is admired more than many of his full-dress numbers. Anything which interrupts the pure business of transcription, any attempt to do it from memory, will take away some of the freshness. It’s not surprising that ...”

“... them. The waterfront becomes a place of longing, and Mitchell writes of it as hauntingly as John Lee Hooker sang of it. In 1938 Mitchell was hired by Harold Ross as a staff writer for the New Yorker, though his first contribution to the magazine had been published in 1933. He took up with writers like ...”

“... their own harpoon, of seamen pulled from the icy waves – with exact descriptions of local fauna. Philip Pullman knew what he was doing when he borrowed Scoresby’s surname for the entrepreneurial balloonist Lee Scoresby in His Dark Materials, since both Scoresbys manage to be at once sentimental and dispassionate polar ...”

“... keeping a lively four-year-old in place.’ This wasn’t her first stint as an artist’s model. Philip Pearlstein had painted Nochlin and her then husband Dick Pommer in 1968. A photograph of Nochlin standing in front of the painting twenty years later shows one of the best interpreters of realist painting acknowledging the artifice of art, an about-turn I ...”

“... that the phrase ‘entered the political lexicon’ in 1980 via the Lancashire Tory MP John Lee, who announced that ‘those of us who represent the regions are increasingly aware of the North-South divide, as 21st-century industry is increasingly sucked towards the South-East.’ The phrase first appeared in Hansard a few months earlier, used by ...”

“... potatoes, were Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears, Carson McCullers, Lincoln Kirstein and Gipsy Rose Lee. When love comes to the confirmed bachelor old friends find it difficult to take. Chums winced to see T.S. Eliot spooning with wife No 2, smirked when they brazenly held hands, and there was a bit of that with Auden. Look at it from the friends’ point of ...”