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“... monster’. Salman Rushdie nominated him ‘International Moron of the Year’ for 1999. Susan Sontag said that there were many many people who would never pick up one of his books again. Presenting the matter in the starkest possible terms, the human rights worker and novelist Jonathan Littell remarked in 2008: When a family is sitting in its house ...”

“... referred to in works by others, and that she dreads ‘any thing, every thing, that brings me forward into Print’. Throughout the diary she defends Johnson’s one-time confidante, Hester Thrale Piozzi, who had been ostracised after marrying her daughter’s music teacher; Burney even intercedes on Piozzi’s behalf in a custody battle. But she’s ...”

“... Kleist wrote to his sister. He was ‘blissfully happy’, he told his cousin, and looking forward to this ‘most splendid and pleasurable of deaths’. Vogel called it ‘their great voyage of discovery’ and, writing to the husband and daughter she was leaving behind, said: ‘I am dying a death such as few mortals have enjoyed … exchanging ...”

“... from that poor, south side of town you could enter by way of the great porch. You were then drawn forward by the light which streamed down from the clerestory windows set in the top – the attic storey, as it were – of the cube. A turn to the right brought you face to face with the altar. It is hard to think of the huge portico as the equivalent of the ...”

“... air with a bat in an ethereal, ladylike, lightly bouncing way. ‘I’d been well trained and came forward to the ball,’ she demonstrated.(Italics are important in Maxtone Graham’s work. So much is conveyed by that forward.)Another benefit of the oral method is that it captures much that an ordinary history would excise ...”

“... seeing someone else,’ she said. The air around us was halogen-rich, glowing. She leaned forward to kiss me again. ‘I don’t think I like him very much.’Do you see how perilously an author can find himself in a scene with Tuesday Weld?Let’s try to be cool and explanatory. Specktor was born in 1966, a year before Bonnie and Clyde; he will have ...”

“... to soothe a crying infant. All she seemed to do was pop round when Tania was feeding Sally and Susan and ask Geoffrey round to the pub for a drink. He’d go, too. ‘Of course Erica has turned lesbian,’ he said, eventually. ‘Well, I can understand that. Why should a woman make do with a man, when she can have another woman?’ And Erica faded out of ...”

“... defeated observers, as if her life stretched back into a fabulous era when dragons roamed. Susan Higginbotham’s carefully written book comes with a misleading cover puff: ‘At last, a biography of one of the most fascinating women of the Tudor period’, who has ‘too long been overlooked’. But Margaret Pole, one of the great magnates of Tudor ...”

“... his impressions might be more useful than whatever Mr Lagnari would tell me. He was leaning forward in bed, propped up on a few pillows, his face more withered and pale than it had been the week before. He winced at the smallest movement, and held his hands over the pit of his stomach as if protecting it. The room was just wider than his double bed. He ...”

“... is a very upbeat, Horatio Alger-style recasting of the celebrated ‘Third Wave’ hypothesis put forward by Alvin and Heidi Toffler. It owes something, indirectly, to the work on the ‘Second Industrial Revolution’ authored by the late Ernest Mandel. And it has some truth to it, even if it is here stated so blithely as to resemble a conservative News from ...”

“... much further than raising some money for their Continental trip. If they had all been looking forward to a new adventure together, however, that soon came to nothing: the poets went their separate ways almost as soon as they arrived in Germany. Coleridge headed for the bright lights of Ratzeburg, a pretty and expensive place, where he threw himself ...”

“... in a blur: you can hear the shot, but you can see the revolver only in slow motion. The car moves forward, brushing Tensing. He falls to the ground. As his body cam jumps and spins, he rights himself and chases after the car, which comes to a stop down the street with a sickening noise as it hits a telephone pole. In the front seat, Samuel DuBose is dead. The ...”

“... do it?’ As a member of the Macmillan Committee on Finance and Industry, moreover, Keynes looked forward eagerly to debating it with Sir Richard Hopkins, the Treasury’s official spokesman. Yet this contest, for one reason or another, was never joined on level terms, for neither in the Treasury Memorandum of 1929, countering the Liberal scheme, nor in ...”

“... a steering wheel or a tiller without fatal muddle. Pilots can learn to pull the stick back or forward to climb. Diplomats and social climbers steer conversations around rocks, whirlpools and Sargasso seas. Exchange dealers operate in money-space, in which a currency out of alignment is a tower that must be shored up or encouraged profitably to fall. Poker ...”

“... on a Friday night when, relieved that it was over for another week, they could down tools and look forward to two days of uninterrupted idleness.’ He’s sitting in hot sunshine outside a café in Taormina, supposedly researching his subject’s ‘savage pilgrimage’ but actually getting on with what turns out to be the book’s real business, which is to ...”