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“... an awkward triangle (first time as romance comedy, second time as painful farce) with his friends Stephen and Natasha Spender, he proposed marriage almost simultaneously to three different women. Women fought over his remains, his private secretary unsuccessfully contesting the will he had changed so often. The title of his final novel, Playback, could be ...”

“... they call her Spender,’ Muriel said of the poet in his scampering years, before he became Sir Stephen. ‘She never puts her hand in her pocket.’ Members felt that drinking anywhere else wasn’t really drinking. Coffield’s book is a terrific ode to screeching – as well as a generous social history – and it lobs a multicoloured grenade into the ...”

“... McChrystal, or the rules of engagement he applied in Afghanistan. His preference for deploying small covert teams away from prying eyes clashed with the expansive boots-on-the-ground counterinsurgency operations that could be scrutinised by reporters, Pentagon higher-ups, politicians and Nato allies. McChrystal’s methods weren’t popular with the people ...”

“... from different religious backgrounds, and when, oh when will she get her period? Margaret joins a small band of girls at school called the Pre-Teen Sensations, who promise to tell each other everything about menstruation, just as soon as it occurs – this enables Blume to describe it from a girl’s-eye (rather than doctor’s-eye or ...”

“... the greater the resentment against landlords and their renting and leasing policies. At Kirkby Stephen the main grievance seems to have been London’s inexplicable abolition of the annual St Luke’s Day holiday, putting paid to the local fair which went with it. There was a kind of climax in the siege of Pontefract Castle, one of the few defensible ...”

“... set of radiating spikes which can easily be confused with normal tissues. Microcalcifications are small flecks of calcium salts, highly opaque to X-rays, which are deposited in the breast either as part of a normal process of change or as a consequence of cancer; sometimes it is possible to classify them as benign or malignant from their appearance on the ...”

“... they describe, and the ones I could find in a preliminary comparison with the old text, are quite small; but the patience and the care (and the good sense) with which they are arrived at are exemplary, and 9000 instances of anything will make a difference. An ampersand is different from the word ‘and’, it matters how far a line is indented, and ...”

“... the Czechoslovak to the Hungarian Party. The most that can be claimed is that the Party, though small, had enjoyed considerable sympathy between the wars among artists, writers, university students and other intellectuals. What is especially striking, given Central European anti-semitism, is the relatively high number of Jewish members. (One third of ...”

“... and an ‘unimpressive Oxford college’, while Turner, the Yorkshire-accented interrogator in A Small Town in Germany (1968), is ‘a former fellow of St Antony’s College, Oxford, which takes all kinds of people’. All three men cast disabused eyes over the ruthless spy chiefs, priggish civil servants and self-seeking diplomats who notice such things ...”

“... The two halves changed shape, feeding and modifying each other.He first visited London as a small boy, in 1849, two years after the opening of the Dorchester to Southampton railway line. But the family’s relationship with the city went back to Hardy’s mother, who as a young servant in the household of the vicar of Stinsford had spent several months ...”

“... that write the script. No social history ‘from below’ for him: ‘History is often shaped by small groups of forward-looking innovators rather than by the backward-looking masses.’ The revolutions of the last two hundred years in the treatment of pathogenic bacteria and the production of antiviral vaccines have made death from infectious disease far ...”

“... them to market. And the foot and mouth epidemic was wiping out herds bred over centuries in Wales. Small farmers, whelped on Common Market subsidies and John Constable idylls, were being priced out of existence by agribusiness and Tesco. In time, the three of us – Karl, Seamus and me – decided to go out there partly to see what we could see but also as a ...”

“... which none of the books mentions. In one of his novels, Patrick O’Brian has his character Stephen Maturin say: ‘Have you ever known a village reputation to be wrong?’ Cherie (I’m going to call her that to avoid confusion with the other Blair) has a village reputation which stresses her ambivalent relationship with fame and her obsession with ...”

“... Alec Campbell, the former Conservative leader of the council (he lost his seat in May), speak in a small caravan in the middle of the field round the back.The fact that both men voted to stay in the EU cuts no ice on the doorstep. ‘When Remainers see a blue rosette they immediately start shouting at you,’ Duran said. ‘You say, “Wait a minute, I voted ...”

“... fisherfolk of the further coasts of Chiba’ who ‘traditionally worked nude with only a small red ribbon tied around the member lest the goddess Benten, deity of the sea, be offended’. Much of this was a consequence of poverty and ruin, of course, but to Richie it was both erotic and romantic. ‘When you look at naked people one of two things can ...”