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“... e! I’m flatter, some think, than a quiche but still I have my own small niche; and, with luck, I can bend your ear like Stephen Spend-                                                 er! The Function of Pets In many households the pets are the ...”

“... ran away. For Dickens, though, the house had a more personal association: he’d admired it as a small boy living nearby, and had been told by his father that if he worked really hard he might one day be able to live there. Recounting this story earlier in the year in a piece written for his weekly, All the Year Round, Dickens had wisely declined to ...”

“... does find is knowledge, self-knowledge first and then knowledge of others. She perceives that the small theatrical company she had worked with for years in a close and productive professional relationship had been a family for her, a product of the kind of healing substitution that Lessing describes in Under My Skin. There are clear parallels between this ...”

“... back of the house is an irregular clearing, muddy in wet weather, dusty in dry, and cluttered with small stones. Here stand the barn, stables and corncrib, patched loosely with rough boards. They have never been painted. ‘My husband patched ‘em up loose on purpose,’ said Mrs Riddle, ‘so if we move he can pull down his boards and take ‘em with ...”

“... he tells me. ‘The ruling party claims to represent us, but it represents nothing but a small minority. We need a proper party system in which people can be voted out as well as in. If we reach such a stage then nobody will be able to say the Egyptian people are passive, apathetic.’ In Aswan popular dissatisfaction with the status quo is fuelled ...”

“... Or why, to come down to particulars, has the American academic machine managed to produce only one small (though admittedly good) book of criticism on O’Hara and two pamphlets – all three published as parts of series – when Frank MacShane’s book is the third full-scale biography to appear within eight years? Is the life so much richer than the ...”

“... them; the second, to read the whole side of a page; the second day she made her take the small book of the Madonna and read the words.’ And throughout this scene of reading – a poignant gesture of love across the gulf not only of class and status but of species – the angel kissed her, touched her breasts and called her his beloved. Bartolomea ...”

“... ensuite bathroom, where the bidet has a jet resembling Lake Geneva’s, is as it was in her day. A small dinner party – all I could manage – huddled at one end of the 30-foot dining-table. Lady Astor did not have a good press in my family. My father had served in North Africa and Italy with the Eighth Army, which Nancy had asserted in the House of Commons ...”

“... of the court. The kind of shameful thing judges see is a minor dispute about which, years ago, two small businesses or people of modest means consulted their respective solicitors, leaving it to them to sort out. Writs have been issued, and the umpteenth skirmish in a procedural war of position is now taking place, with barristers briefed on both sides and ...”

“... Stephen​ Spender had spent two terms as an undistinguished student at University College, Oxford, before he finally met W.H. Auden. It was not for want of trying. Michael, Spender’s elder brother, an insufferable turbo-brain at Balliol, had known Auden at school and kept in touch, but refused to arrange an introduction for Stephen, fearing, as Spender later put it, that ‘in producing me he would be playing the weakest card in his hand ...”

“... Irish magazines provided a public forum for the emergent nation. For every priest enacting Stephen Dedalus’s vision in Ulysses of a never-ending Mexican wave of elevations, consecrations and consumptions of the host (‘Dringdring! And two streets off another locking it into a pyx. Dringadring!’), there will always be a subeditor on a paper like Mr ...”

“... New Statesman in its various political and intellectual contexts and relates the fortunes of the small-circulation political weekly to the seismic political changes of 1916-29 that virtually destroyed British Liberalism and brought Labour precariously to power. At the same time Smith wants to show that the magazine’s early fortunes can have lessons for ...”

“... of my nurse’s rocking chair, when she had sat beside me every night while I went to sleep, as a small child, rocking, rocking. Such fine points, in which the familiar flips over into the unfamiliar (and vice versa), recur throughout The Woman in Black, and impel us to disregard its flavour of mild archaism. Susan Hill has carefully managed the sequence of ...”

“... as a Kumbaya invitation to join hands for a moral-historical promenade. In reality, as Stephen Ellis was able to show in 2011, Mandela joined the Central Committee of the South African Communist Party in 1960 to help impose the SACP’s strategic choice of armed struggle on a reluctant ANC leadership. Mandela was the first leader of the ANC’s ...”

“... that her words are getting smaller and smaller because her notebook is now almost full – ‘so small that perhaps they are not even legible any more’. The fact that we can no longer read her, in any sense, is felt as a loss in the desolation of which we are all potentially ...”