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“... she discovered Thackeray, Dickens and Fielding, and, later, black writers (Paul Laurence Dunbar, James Weldon Johnson, Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston) who informed her own experience and that of ‘the Race’. But more important to the young Marshall than the testimonies of the page were the stories she heard in the kitchen of her brownstone ...”

“... Rome, since the Gonzagas let him make off with a clutch of antique busts that includes a young Marcus Aurelius. The imperial prince is portrayed staring wistfully away from us into the philosophic beyond: an image of governance as a sedative to the governed that saps their contentious energies, leaving them mild and calm. But the grand, dimly lit gallery ...”

“... Wyatt departed from his Italian model for the poem in omitting its tribute to the tyrant-slayer Marcus Brutus and substituting for him the safer figure of Marcus Cato. Was this self-protection, or a gesture of deference to Henry – or a wink to the knowing reader which makes the allusion to tyrannicide conspicuous by its ...”

“... must have been considerably worse than the Oxford Russian-English dictionary compiled by Marcus Wheeler – which my wife found less than adequate when she was translating Pasternak’s poetry. More important are mistakes of tone or straightforward clumsiness, of which there are relatively few examples in Garnett. In ‘A Dreary Story’, even ...”

“... her to read H.P. Lovecraft’s horror stories in much the same way he recommends students to try a James Bond novel. All the same, H.P. Lovecraft – with his fatuous ghoulishness, revived and found modish in the 1970s – brings his influence to bear on the seventh chapter. The female students are cute and dinky, with their bright-coloured, tasteless food and ...”

“... of my immortal cupboard with LZ (especially the short poems), Emily Dickinson, Thoreau, Lucretius, Marcus Aurelius, John Muir, bits from Santayana, D.H. Lawrence, Dahlberg, William Carlos Williams, and haiku. These knew “when/ to listen/what falls/glistens now/in the ear.”’ After the deaths of her mother in 1951 and her father in 1954, to both of whom ...”

“... woods. Many people in Dewsbury think the media overdid it. ‘The press wanted to make it another James Bulger,’ a police officer tells me. The CPS reduced the charge from attempted murder to assault with intent to cause grievous bodily harm, which is what the girl was found guilty of. Still, it was horrible, and not a surprise, to watch the TV graphics on ...”

“... in the Piazza Navona, watching the solemn celebrations inside and outside the church of Saint James of the Spanish. A ‘castle’ had been erected on top of each of the fountains in the piazza. As Piers watched, an angel descended from one of the castles and set fire to an ‘artifitiall divell’. Musical instruments sounded and fireworks exploded. Then ...”

“... the nature of altruism and the problem of sexual reproduction; while the mathematically gifted Marcus Potter, Frederica’s younger brother, meditates on infinite numbers, the Fibonacci spiral, and ‘the mystery of phyllotaxis’. Even the charismatic madman who becomes the leader of the cult is an intellectual and a systematiser, who studies Kierkegaard ...”

“... Brilliant and mercurial, he had charmed Hoover, who dined several times at his house, and mentored James Angleton, the future CIA head of counterintelligence. As Allen Dulles later said, Philby had the keys to the CIA safe. An internal investigation was inconclusive. He was asked to tender his resignation and, according to his highly unreliable ...”

“... Stead seems to have been misremembering or paraphrasing a line of Virginia Woolf’s about Henry James) grew out of D.T. Max’s post-mortem profile of Wallace for the New Yorker, and is very much the version of his life as seen from Times Square. ‘Every story has a beginning and this is David Wallace’s’ is Max’s first sentence. It’s a funny way to ...”

“... women who had escaped from their owners in London, only to be recaptured, came to public attention.James Somerset, who had been brought to England from Virginia by his owner, Charles Stewart, and managed to escape and live freely for a brief period, became the subject of a test case in 1772. Was the ownership of people legal in the ‘mother ...”

“... obtains only in international conflicts, not in civil wars. And second, as the legal scholar David Marcus pointed out, the obligation on warring parties to permit relief aid ‘retreats in the face of the military necessity of blockade’. In 1998, when the Rome Statute for the International Criminal Court (ICC) was negotiated, a Cuban proposal to prohibit ...”

“... to give them extra zest’, while the Man Group is an investment management business, though the James Man who founded the original company was an 18th-century barrel-maker (his firm supplied the navy with rum for almost two hundred years). Touches such as Elysian’s ‘Giraffe carrot’, so large that a single specimen can fill a vegetable dish for Sunday ...”

“... the last to be born are, soberingly, Stephen Adrian Lawrence (1974-93, ‘murder victim’) and James Patrick Bulger (1990-93, ‘murder victim’). And so ends the 20th century. Turning from subjects to contributors, the roll-call is undeniably impressive; surely no other project could come near to matching the success of the ODNB in commanding the labour ...”