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“... their charm, like credits in early films which “introduce” Shirley Temple, Marilyn Monroe or James Dean. But they didn’t in the end quite merit selection.’) The book is organised thematically, and if it isn’t immediately clear why a piece in praise of cats comes under ‘Religion, Politics and Philosophy’ instead of, say, ‘Autobiography and ...”

“... Palmer concentrated on white revolutionaries, in his 1938 classic, The Black Jacobins, C.L.R. James successfully revived interest in the slaves and free blacks active in Saint-Domingue’s revolution in 1791. Arguing that liberty, equality and fraternity meant even more to the enslaved in France’s richest Caribbean colony than to the inhabitants of ...”

“... spectacular car crash that wrecked his face. There are three kinds of classic American crash: the James Dean, Eddie Cochran legend-sealer; the Bob Dylan at Woodstock disaster turned into an opportunity for reinvention; and the sweet Gene Vincent long martyrdom. Clift could have been another James Dean. Instead he was ...”

“... kung fu movies and Oprah Winfrey.’ Wright introduces us to a cast that includes Corporal Harold James Trombley, a 19-year-old who sits in the back of a Humvee ‘waiting all day for permission to fire his machine gun’. And when he does fire, the thrill of the fight represents a kind of ecstasy for him. Wright reports that ‘every time’ Trombley ‘gets ...”

“... came Eric, born 1883 (according to the family tree) or 1884 (according to the timeline); and William, born 1884 (family tree) or 1886 (timeline). A pair of quantum children, impossible to pin down! The journey between continents took place in 1892 (timeline) or 1893 (according to the ship’s manifest quoted). Hinton himself died in 1904 (family tree) or ...”

“... in whose head an infinity of names and places are buzzing around: the 17th-century antiquarian was William Dugdale, not Thomas; the early Victorian author of The Mansions of England in the Olden Time was the artist Joseph Nash, not the architect John; the authority on Hadrian’s Wall is Robin Birley, not Robert; ...”

“... are more often yet another stumbling-block for the seeker of sexual free spirits in the period. James Mill’s belief in the felicific calculus, and disdain for conventional morality, did not budge him one inch from an extreme austerity in sexual ethics (nor from marital exploitativeness: his wife was an unloved ‘drudge’ who bore him ten ...”

“... here are children; sometimes they have been seen by children, too, as in the case of a certain William, who was sent away from his home in Apt after a series of violent incidents and died in 1211 after a brawl. On several nights not long after his death, he appeared, naked except for some rags, to his 11-year-old girl cousin, who had been very fond of ...”

“... Janey Morris, whose remarkable appearance was so close to Rossetti’s pictures of her that Henry James was unsure whether she was an original or a copy, the Macdonald sisters, though strikingly attractive, were not in the heavy-eyed big-haired vein. If they were, as suggested, the models for Burne-Jones’s The King’s Daughters then a great deal must have ...”

“... The sea was, after all, the fastest and most economic mode of travel in the pre-modern world. As William Dalrymple points out in The Golden Road, ships could carry much larger cargoes than camels and sail around wars, blockades and ambushes.Dalrymple’s own odyssey is equally laden to the gunwales with pages of astounding illustrations and arresting ...”

“... book on the KGB and fairly early in Harlot’s Ghost its eponymous figure, ‘Harlot’, a James Angleton composite, says of the Agency that ‘our real duty is to become the mind of America.’ How else to link the Mafia, Marilyn Monroe, the media, the Congress, Hollywood and all the other regions of CIA penetration? ‘The mind of America’. A ...”

“... stylised composure; and Whitman’s composure finds its equal among American writers only in Henry James. With majestic aloofness, he likes, as he says early in Song of Myself, to be ‘both in and out of the game and watching and wondering at it’. And like the games James plays in The Turn of the Screw, Whitman’s are ...”

“... high-profile exemplar of this style was the magnate, George Walker; once, according to James Morton, an ‘ally’ of Billy Hill and Eddie Chapman, later a frequently puffed adornment of the Thatcherite open market culture.) There is nothing new in the concept, quality tailoring bonded over primal naughtiness. It has been spelled out frequently in ...”

“... James Bond was a well-known ornithologist. His Birds of the West Indies is an unusually rich source of names. According to Bond, the Sooty Tern is also known as the Egg Bird; Booby; Bubí; Hurricane Bird; Gaviota Oscura; Gaviota Monja; Oiseau Fou; Touaou. But when the keen birdwatcher Ian Fleming needed a name that sounded as ordinary as possible, he had to look no further than the title page of Bond’s great work ...”

“... of fiction.’ This remark probably arose from his habitual disrespect for, or worry about, Henry James. The Ambassadors is given more attention in Aspects of the Novel than any other novel, except possibly Gide’s Les Faux-Monnayeurs, though the intention is in neither case to praise or to admire; and the Commonplace Book contains mildly disparaging remarks ...”