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“... than once Bunche thought himself lucky to get out alive. A half dozen years later Trygve Lie, the first secretary-general of the United Nations, appeared in Bunche’s life. Bunche was running the trusteeship division at the UN, proving himself capable, imaginative and cool in a crisis; in 1948 Lie made him deputy in a two-man team charged with mediating the ...”

“... of infamy’ after the publication of Discipline and Punish and The Will to Knowledge, the first volume of his History of Sexuality, and in collaboration with a junior colleague, Arlette Farge, began to work on an edition of lettres de cachet solicited or issued by members of the prisoners’ families. In her afterword to the ...”

“... are no accidents, only genres. This second film is The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, based on the first novel in the late Stieg Larsson’s bestselling trilogy (the others are The Girl Who Played with Fire and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest), coolly directed by Niels Arden Oplev; an American version is apparently in the works, to be made by David ...”

“... the ANC and was able to ensure that the only whites and Indians allowed to join were those who had first joined the SACP. But even among ANC blacks it was widely accepted that the more disciplined, committed and militant you were, the clearer it was that your true home was within the SACP. The SACP applied strict Leninist tactics and for once they worked like ...”

“... titre needed a court lady to sponsor and present her at court. Louise de la Vallière, Louis’s first candidate for the position, was already his long-term mistress, but their two children were officially bastards. Louis, setting out for the battlefield and aware that he might not survive it, re-evaluated his life and made some changes. He named Louise ...”

“... be a kind of snuff movie. What is this novel saying about biographers and biographies? When the first thirty or so pages of The Biographer’s Tale were first published (in New Writing 8, 1999), the extract was called ‘Brief Lives’. So a good starting point might be John Aubrey, but perhaps it would be better to begin ...”

“... him than cause him grief or loss. In his working life he was rarely without champions, his mother Ruth being the first (however unwelcome she was in the role of booster). For a diffident man he had many friends, and for a difficult writer he had many readers. As an Australian writer he was English enough to reassure the ...”

“... since Reunification – the vegetable garden probably didn’t survive for long. When Fontane first came to Berlin in 1833, to go to school, the city was a small provincial capital: by the mid-1880s, a decade after Unification, its population had risen to more than 1.3 million and it was the focus of a newly powerful state. The way of life to which ...”

“... environment. In the introduction to the collection of her reprinted essays Clichés of Urban Doom, Ruth Glass offers a forceful, eloquent and polemical expression of the view that planning, along with all the basic values and institutions of the modern democratic welfare state, has been uprooted and up-ended since 1979 by a gigantic conjuring trick which has ...”

“... German Requiem’ and ‘Children in Exile’ are poems that work by a new and at first disconcerting technique, not to move us or to establish feeling, but to suggest a situation where feeling in the reader grows by itself. This neue Sachlichkeit arranges objects familiar and unfamiliar in unexpected ways, not so much to ‘make it ...”

“... one another as their careers and characters diverge. The Ice-House revolves around the lives of Ruth and Daisy, friends from childhood and near-neighbours in the fashionable but vandalised London square which provides a diverse and lively setting for their intertwining familial sagas. By comparison with these two pairs of characters, each embodying a range ...”

“... Victorian studies. Raymond Williams jump-started this re-evaluation in 1958, when he described her first novel, Mary Barton, as ‘the most moving response in literature to the industrial suffering of the 1840s’. Although Williams went on to complain about the book’s shift of focus from factory politics to romance, his work assured Gaskell’s place in ...”

“... to come up with offensive rhyming chants) broke the most precious record in American sports, Babe Ruth’s mark of 60 home runs in a single season, which had stood for 34 years. When Maris struck number 61 in the final game of the 1961 season, no one seemed especially pleased: not the Yankee fans, who resented his stealing the Babe’s thunder; not the New ...”

“... Even the never-particularly-prosperous New Statesman felt it necessary to produce a history of its first fifty years. Equally obviously, any self-respecting journal will have to accept a truthful history or be a laughing-stock – and there will always be plenty of former colleagues around to point out mis-statements or lacunae. Mind you, this convention may ...”

“... relations that often supply warmth in his fiction (Nicholas and Kate Nickleby, Tom and Ruth Pinch, Florence and Paul Dombey). He was attached to Fanny, but her achievements served only to confirm the loss of his proper place in the world. Boys were expected to make their fortune, while girls would support their efforts. His chaotic family seemed to ...”