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“... Verga, the verista novelist admired and translated by D.H. Lawrence (and discussed here by James Wood on 10 August) – is the key to Sicily, where people like to explain, over the most concentrated espresso drunk anywhere in Europe, exactly why everyone else’s version of an incident or situation is flawed, self-interested, corrupt or downright ...”

“... mindful of his Christian faith. He flattered Louis XIV but denounced monarchs who, like the Sun King, made war and generated misery. Although he wrote about fields and farmyards and celebrated rural quiet, he was a devout Parisian and addicted to salon talk. He wrote decorously of love but frequented taverns and brothels, and his sunny verse was the product ...”

“... to her own brother. Others, less sure of themselves, fall through the cracks. Lucia Joyce, James Joyce’s troubled daughter, given to ‘acting up, setting her hair on fire’, is packed off to Switzerland to be ‘stilled, in a straitjacket’. Hazel, Peggy’s younger sister (always late, forgetful, bewildered), ends up in a New York institution ...”

“... moral disquiet: his intense engagement with the unstable heroes of Taxi Driver, Raging Bull and King of Comedy, and his passion about The Last Temptation of Christ, have had controversial effects. This is a slightly different case, though: Henry is the protagonist of the film, not because his story is the register of an exceptional sensibility, but because ...”

“... can see, any linking principle or devices – a bag of nails, in other words. Firebird 2 is also a King Penguin (second series) which means that the ornithology of the anthology is strange. The candescent title and Lawrentian colophon testify to a fierce will to survive (perhaps also to the new style at Harmondsworth). Self-evidently, at least one rebirth has ...”

“... didn’t see the real Los Angeles until 1965. But to him the city was a myth as powerful as King Arthur. ‘I rented a car at the airport and drove down the length of Sunset in time to see the sun sink into the Pacific … I spent my time driving aimlessly around the freeways. It was concrete over sand. The anguish of lost souls … The people had lost ...”

“... rejected, and at some point in 1705 or early 1706, he left Scotland. ‘There is no evidence,’ James Buchan writes, ‘he ever returned.’ Law was born in 1671, the son of William Law, a master goldsmith who, like other goldsmiths of his time, drifted from metallurgy into finance, becoming a lender to clients. Success in this sphere enabled the purchase ...”

“... gave rise to a sense of a much broader Phoenician Mediterranean. Melqart, whose name means ‘king of the city’, is said to have been introduced to Tyre in the tenth century bc, but his cult spread widely. Like Hercules, with whom he was later identified, he was a wandering hero, credited with founding many cities. If the tophet cult divides, Melqart ...”

“... bawdiness (‘fancy him, darling?’): the effect is rather like Arthur Balfour voicing Sid James. ‘Enter toge,’ Chapter 1 begins, ‘wheeled slowly in by French and German ladies of vague conditions in life.’ Or: ‘he himself rated success in flesh to include dogs, rain rope, and also a certain condition of Asiatic elation.’ Or: ‘art ...”

“... by Conrad and Ford Madox Ford, and aware also of the new rules of the game as promulgated by Henry James with his passion for ‘doing’. Bennett greatly admired Conrad, but decided against this kind of ‘doing’. The Old Wives’ Tale (1908) was almost contemporary with Nostromo, which he called ‘the finest novel of this generation’; but his own ...”

“... Plot of 1678, English Whigs under the leadership of Shaftesbury unsuccessfully tried to exclude King Charles II’s Catholic brother, James, Duke of York, from the succession. Locke’s First Treatise was also a response to the posthumous publication in 1680 of Patriarcha by the early 17th-century royalist Sir Robert ...”

“... in ages, putting aside thoughts of what had gone wrong and what would happen to him when the Great King found out, or rather, perhaps exhausted by them. What he dreamt, says Herodotus, no one knows, but the next day it had consequences. At dawn he ordered a search of every ship in the navy. A stolen statue was found in one of them, predictably a tricky ...”

“... down – and the queasy attitude of those white ‘moderates’ in the 1960s whom Martin Luther King lamented in his famous letter from jail in Birmingham, Alabama were ‘more devoted to “order” than to justice’.‘The thing is,’ Smith told Curve magazine earlier this year,everyone has an identity – historically, culturally, politically and ...”

“... Watford, a stop on the trail that begins with the selfie queue by J.K. Rowling’s Platform 9¾ at King’s Cross Station, just over the way from St Pancras, where the trains from St Albans pull in to Central London. The big producers and stars fly in for a shoot at the Warner Brothers studio next to the Harry Potter set, but they don’t stay long. Painted on ...”

“... the year Balzac wrote Cousin Pons, Verdi wrote Macbeth, Berlioz composed The Damnation of Faust, James Simpson first successfully used chloroform, the German Gustav Kirchhoff spelled out the laws of electric currents in a network of wires and Carl Zeiss opened an optics factory in Jena, Switzerland. It was the year Alfred Krupp cast his first steel gun and ...”