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“... Légion d’Honneur in 1988 and Commandeur des Arts et des Lettres in 1992, shortly after he had risen from his sickbed to receive his last standing ovation at the premiere of his production of La Bayadère. He died on 6 January 1993. An elaborate funeral cortège made its way first to the Palais Garnier and then to the Russian cemetery in the distant suburb ...”

“... which is a pity, because there’s a challenge here which he has identified but not quite risen to: a novel which imitates the newspaper format in every respect, with illustrations, classified ads, even horoscopes and TV listings all playing their part in a single narrative which would have to work its way up, I suppose, to a sporting ...”

“... and wife-beater, does not seem so very evil. I have encountered more intimidating villains in James Bond novels. Surely the Son of God deserved a mightier and more sinister adversary than a vain-glorious old merchant who has lost most of his trading capital and who will eventually be ditched by his wife? But Crace’s Jesus is hardly a figure of power ...”

“... Lowell can boast a Great Aunt Sarah thundering ‘on the keyboard of her dummy piano’ and ‘risen like the phoenix / from her bed of trouble-some snacks and Tauchnitz classics’, Harrison’s relations are more familiar figures, bickering on Blackpool’s Golden Mile or locked into their ordinarily absurd theatre of non-communication: Your life’s ...”

“... of 56, was a woman who had reason to congratulate herself on making a success of her life. She had risen from undistinguished but respectable suburban beginnings to the position of headmistress of the select Madeira School for girls, in McLean, Virginia. She had married young and had two fine sons. She had kept her looks, and, apart from the occasional bout of ...”

“... Proust, Trollope, Dickens, Shakespeare and certain Latin poets (Martial, Horace). Of the King James version of the Bible, he said: ‘It’s frightfully good.’ Early on he praised the work of Derek Walcott, who had once been a friend of his, and recited a whole poem, ‘As John to Patmos’, from memory. But later he rubbished him, and Walcott replied ...”

“... the only child of oddly isolated parents – ‘both from working-class backgrounds but [who] had risen through education into the middle class – Mum a teacher, Dad a civil servant … I think they still felt a bit precarious, like first-generation immigrants.’ She was 16, the brainiest girl at her posh girls’ day school, when she was ‘picked up’ by ...”

“... Between 1881 and 1885, London averaged 55 foggy days a year; between 1886 and 1890, that had risen to 63. Moscow Dynamo v. Tottenham Hotspur, 1945 These mortality statistics released a fresh burst of health warnings, from the British Medical Journal to the bestselling pamphlet London Fogs by Rollo Russell, son of the former prime minister. They also ...”

“... a role it has had in producing the current total of three million unemployed is more debatable. James Meade has no doubt that it has played the key role; and he devotes the greater part of the first of his two volumes on Stagflation to an analysis of reforms in wage-fixing methods which would promote rather than destroy employment. The reforms, he ...”

“... capture of Shanghai, and his subsequent internment in Lunghua airfield camp, outside the city. James Ballard’s narrative, pitched ambiguously between autobiography and fiction, records the lost childhood of a lad variously nicknamed Jim and Jamie. (As far as I can see, the surname is never given – but it’s not hard to ...”

“... to show how angry they are.’The nature of the constituency party is changing. Membership has risen by more than half in the past year. Maybe I was projecting, but neither Duran nor Campbell seemed glad about this. ‘We see some people leaving the party and others joining,’ Campbell said: ‘We’ve had a 65 per cent increase in membership from June to ...”

“... explored the development of the Church of England over the two long reigns of Elizabeth I and James I, and one of Collinson’s achievements, executed with singular modesty and generosity, has been to draw their conclusions together and to set them in perspective. But the findings which count for most are the author’s own. To the non-specialist ...”

“... of account should be given of the shaping of the conditions of life by life itself? In the 1970s James Lovelock, independent scientist and inventor, proposed the Gaia hypothesis. He argued that the Earth regulates itself, and responds to change, in the same sort of way that a single living organism does. The Earth acts to keep itself alive. Lovelock’s new ...”

“... of stabbings and no-go zones.It is true that ‘knife crime’ – a synthetic category – has risen steadily in recent years, as has Londoners’ fear of crime, though the increase began around the midpoint of Boris Johnson’s second term as mayor. Police data on knife crime with injury suggests a downward trend since 2017 but, that said, few doubt the ...”

“... the modest but watchful Connor household would be visited by Uncle Bob, a former miner who had risen to become a high-up sort of civil servant, an OBE, no less. The boy Karl observed with admiration Bob’s air of ‘frigid Olympian quiet’, ‘the awe’ of his ‘presence’. His visits ‘disclosed a high grand somewhere else, where human beings were ...”