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“... spirits and the invocation of angeli boni – Dee brought out his ‘shew stone’, or crystal ball. The soi-disant Talbot ‘then settled himself to the Action … and within one quarter of an hour (or less) he had sight of one in the stone’. The angel identified itself as Uriel. It ‘spake plainly’, in a mixture of Latin and English, ‘to the ...”

“... fruit, flying kites made of old newspapers, fishing in the river with my father, playing ball’. Provincial children of a similar social class in oil-importing countries which were even poorer, such as Colombia next door, or in Central America or the Caribbean, had considerably less favourable life chances. Even so, Chávez only occasionally ...”

“... defence correspondent, Richard Norton-Taylor, sends me an email from London which he received from Simon Wren, an MoD press officer. Wren is ranting about my colleagues’ earlier reports on how soldiers haven’t got enough toilet paper, aren’t getting decent food and haven’t got the right colour of uniform. He’s put his mobile number at the bottom. I ...”

“... dock on perambulatory trial for their lives. He is interested in the feelings of the squash ball and the champagne bottle that launches the ship. In a football match his sympathy is not with either of the teams but with the ball or, in a match ending nil-nil, with the hunger of the goalmouth. He would be unable to ...”

“... Even five years ago a book on our constitutional future would have been an unfocused crystal-ball job or a set of optimistic exhortations, and volumes on the two Parliamentary chambers have been either self-congratulatory or merely descriptive accounts of unsatisfactory procedures and bad habits. In that short time the landscape has been changed not only ...”

“... stools. Boys holding sticks resembling rolling pins and wearing huge gloves on one hand played ball in the middle of the streets. They bellowed in adult voices. Among shoe, lamp, rug stores and flower shops stood a mortuary. Pallbearers dressed in black carried out a coffin decorated in wreaths and loaded it into a car draped with curtains. The family or ...”

“... the book Julius attends a performance of Mahler’s Ninth Symphony at Carnegie Hall, conducted by Simon Rattle. He notices details in the music for the first time, relishing for instance a third movement that is ‘loud, rude and as burlesque as it could conceivably be’. After the concert he inadvertently uses an emergency exit, one that leads directly to a ...”

“... he writes. ‘My heart broke.’ At other times, liquored up, Doug could be a wrecking ball. Once, at the age of ten, hearing a family fight downstairs, Springsteen attacked his father with a baseball bat. Although with time and psychoanalysis he came to understand and forgive his father, during his growing up, Doug was a menacing absent ...”

“... of the concert.’ In his wonderfully detailed study Concert Life in London from Mozart to Haydn, Simon McVeigh suggests that at public concerts ‘serious attention to the music was a rarity.’ Turning up on time was definitely bad form. ‘On account of you I almost heard the opera,’ Groucho snarls at his too prompt cab driver, a reproach one imagines ...”

“... a nice warm and varied shade the protester had achieved. ‘Maze brown’ I suppose Farrow and Ball would tastefully have called it. 4 March. We stay the night at Lacock, as R. is doing a shoot at nearby Corsham Court. In the morning we walk round this picture-book village wholly owned by the National Trust since 1944. It’s not yet ten o’clock but ...”

“... beyond a telephone chat with a GP. ‘The hospital services are always attentive and on the ball, but once you leave hospital, the GP becomes your access to any help,’ she explained. ‘We fell foul of a lot of reforms that have taken place.’ Fisher was 48 when he died, ‘an influential writer, music blogger and university lecturer’, the Ipswich ...”

“... from Paris, brilliant and sometimes wildly eccentric gospels for future human communities. Saint-Simon, Fourier and Cabet inspired models of collective harmony. The emaciated revolutionary veteran Filippo Buonarotti founded clandestine conspiracy networks devoted to the proto-communist vision of ‘Gracchus’ Babeuf, guillotined in 1797. One of ...”

“... of Blake’s visionary portraits – part fraudulent, part inspired. Shadows in a crystal ball. The London Ackroyd, interlocutor for Dickens and Dan Leno, had shifted his critical position from Modernism to heritage curation, clarifying with clear lines all that had previously been ambiguous. Pound, with whom Ackroyd began, was no longer a fashionable ...”

“... But the government is keeping him waiting.‘What can I do?’ asks the governor of Upper Nile, Simon Kun Puoch, a remarkably alert and lively man. Settled in a comfortable cream-coloured leather armchair, in a carefully designed room decorated in white, beige and brown, enhanced by the candy pink of what look like balls of straw stacked up in large ...”

“... Everything else will be diffused to the community. Loosely directed by the head of NHS England, Simon Stevens, money, staff and new investment are being directed towards primary care – family doctors, community nurses, souped-up local clinics, systems to help the chronically unwell live at home. In universe two a counter-reality prevails: the reality of ...”