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“... meantime not dealt so kindly with Mary Kathleen Macrory Ackland – universally known as Molly. Robert Ackland’s charisma had always had a punitive edge: he insisted that his daughter accompany him on his rounds in the surgical wards; and then afterwards, according to Warner, to the brothel he frequented, where she would be told to wait in the ...”

“... blacks in Chicago and other Northern cities to respond to stimuli as European immigrants had. Robert Kennedy’s ideas for the urban Community Development programme were based on the notion that the ghettos could be converted (in Lemann’s words) ‘into the kind of launching-pads for immigrant upward mobility that the Irish neighbourhoods of Boston had ...”

“... what she conducts, from the day Chatwin walked into her office at Cape in 1976 to his memorial service in 1989 at the Greek Cathedral in Moscow Road, West London. There is, of course, a long detour to browse the greater part of his life, before they met. The story of a relationship between a successful writer and an editor can be told by either, but ...”

“... a bay), William Baffin (who became an island) and Vitus Bering (who became a strait). He describes Robert Peary claiming the North Pole for America, and how, to keep up the morale of his men, Richard Collinson erected a billiard table on the sea-ice of Cambridge Bay. The table was fashioned from snow blocks, the cushions from walrus skin stuffed with ...”

“... Captain acted with such civility that he became Darwin’s ‘beau ideal’ before they left port. Robert McCormick, the ship’s surgeon and ipso facto naturalist, was so put out by the social preference and hindrance to his own efforts to collect that he quit in Rio and shipped home. (The tradesman-status of naval surgeons in the 1830s was notorious.) It was ...”

“... romantic passage of Mary’s life. In 1899 she opened her heart to George Nathan of the Colonial Service, calling herself ‘that melancholy thing that will always serve and fear you’. Nothing came of it. Nathan was a confirmed bachelor, who had hoped to make use of Mary’s knowledge and influence. To him she was ‘the cheerful Miss Kingsley’. ‘I’m ...”

“... internal unity has gravely impaired. The hollowness of this pretext has become obvious ever since Robert Simpson, one of our leading composers, announced his resignation after decades of distinguished BBC service: the saddest event, this, in the BBC’s musical history. Otherwise, the Corporation has succeeded, more or ...”

“... enthusiasm for Ossian saw the publication of the important Homeric studies of Thomas Blackwell and Robert Wood. In the late 18th century there was a revival of serious education in the ancient universities, and the institution of the Tripos at Cambridge and the Honour Schools at Oxford had the effect of increasing substantially the numbers of those able to ...”

“... or the heady jouissance of sexual pleasure, but of anticipating one’s death by living in the service of others. It is this which Heidegger lamentably misses, in his failure to link what he calls Mitsein – living with others – with the authenticity of being resolute for death. The latter is then debased to a kind of solitary heroism, with unsavoury ...”

“... in colour with charging Highlanders, ‘sporrans abristle’. Newbolt’s sons survived active service, though one had severe shell-shock about which his father unsympathetically commented, ‘I wish his hands wouldn’t shake so,’ lamenting also that he had got an extension of leave on medical grounds. ‘I’m sorry that he isn’t doing more for his ...”

“... fear of stimulating anti-semitism turned Leo Frank into a gentile Yankee businessman. But Robert Rossen, the young Jewish Communist who adapted the story for the screen, didn’t forget what he saw as his own betrayal of the Jews. A decade later, directing the first Hollywood Jewish/black buddy film, Body and Soul, Rossen made the last shot of They ...”

“... seriously and were instead formulating increasingly aggressive plans. On 19 October the military service chiefs confronted Kennedy with demands for an immediate attack on Cuba by land, sea and air.The most hawkish among them, the air force chief of staff, Curtis LeMay, who had made his name incinerating hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians during the ...”

“... kneecapped and executed those they suspected of being informers for the British state. Captain Robert Nairac, a member of the army’s undercover 14 Intelligence Company, apparently frustrated with the lack of information he was getting from the RUC, decided to go to a pub in South Armagh one Saturday night in 1977, a pistol hidden in his clothes, in an ...”

“... be the best Irish poet since Yeats, which arose from rather casual remarks by the power-crazed Robert Lowell and the craze-powered Clive James, who seemed to have forgotten both MacNeice and Kavanagh. In the meantime, Heaney is a very good poet indeed – which is enough to be going on with.Heaney’s version of the Middle Irish Romance Buile Suibhne ...”

“... medicine Cummings proposed to turbocharge innovation – including drastic reform of the civil service, and massive R&D spending in place of simply funnelling money up north – was far too much for Johnson, who was terrified it might make him unpopular. That left a vacuum where serious policy might be. Soon enough the empty space was filled by ...”