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“... now I live in Washington and I see the old Rhodes Class of those years going about its business: Robert Reich running the Labour Department and Strobe Talbott managing US-Russian relations from Foggy Bottom and Ira Magaziner trying to recover from his moment as person-in-charge of Bill and Hillary’s health care ‘reform’.When I want to recall those ...”

“... the cognoscenti like a confederation of secret masters: Gerald Kersh, James Curtis, Mark Benney, Robert Westerby, Alexander Baron, John Lodwick, Jack Trevor Story. They have been struck from the canon, these technicians, these life-enhanced witnesses. They are noticed only by slumming journalists (who have built up their own collections of the stuff) or by ...”

“... Robert Stone​ was the feral child of American literature. He arrived in the world with no one to explain or defend him, except his mother, Gladys. About her we know only stray bits of personal history. The chief evidence that Stone’s father existed is the fact of Stone himself. All other claims – that he was a railroad detective, was a Greek or a Jew, had been killed by a bomb in Shanghai in 1937, even that his given name was Homer – are hearsay, most of them floated by Gladys one day, taken back the next ...”

“... moving car from the front, outside the windscreen, the camera slightly off to the driver’s left. Ray Liotta, looking young and spruce but tired, is at the wheel, his face well lit. Robert de Niro, in the passenger seat, is asleep. Joe Pesci, in the back seat, is nodding off. A thumping noise is heard, and Liotta ...”

“... on Buddenbrooks for life among the haute bourgeoisie in prewar Germany and Swiss sanatoria, and Robert Musil’s Young Törless for possible events during Brandt’s schooldays. Where there is no proof, there is supposition. For example: ‘There is ample evidence that Brandt suffered a psychic wound in his school days, something so hurtful that it affected ...”

“... He was the great man who was interested in great men. This could also be said of the modern poet Robert Lowell, a man of ‘tumbles and leaps’ and ‘manic crushes’ who was interested in the ‘great Boswell’ (so called by a Lady Lemon in 1792). At one point in the history of his elations and depressions Lowell was heard to speak of a trip to Scotland ...”

“... by Circe, comes to Ithaca and accidentally kills him with an arrow made from the sting of a sting-ray, Penelope marries Telegonus, Telemachus marries Circe and they all live happily ever after. These poems seem to have been composed later, in response to the success of the Homeric epics, to fill in the gaps that Homer had left, and some of it – the ...”

“... and those unwilling to look fools, widens. Lawrence Weschler’s life of the Californian artist Robert Irwin is the best description I know of why spending months deciding how to put two orange lines on an orange square, or why offering a strip of black tape round the skirting of a gallery as your contribution to an exhibition, could be ...”

“... Robert Martin’s book is not one of those literary biographies that reshuffle a familiar narrative and perhaps add a few bits of new information or conjecture. It is a full-scale life, founded on primary sources, many of them previously unpublished. As the first major biography since Hallam Tennyson’s pious memoir of 1897, it has obvious importance ...”

“... units, Ian Bremner writes in the Introduction to the very useful collection he has edited with Ray Taras, institutions were set up identically, with replications of not only party but also cultural, scientific and educational facilities. Economic policy also appeared egalitarian in structure, based on the premise of giving to each according to his needs ...”

“... Would-be punters on stiffs.com are egged on with a ‘newest stiffs’ page (current features: Ray Bradbury, Richard Dawson) and the lure of ‘cyberboner’ windfalls for those who manage to pick the next celebs to go. All this elicits from Sandel a mixture of bafflement and revulsion. In fact, as Sandel recognises, the line between insurance and gambling ...”

“... subject of conversation’? (Might Crick and Watson have economised on all that trouble with the X-ray photographs – there’s a causal story for you – and just spread some gossip about the helix, as they did occasionally about their rivals?) What, above all, makes a project ‘possible’ for us? Should the unhappy discoverers of cold fusion, as they ...”

“... be pedantic, he can be observant, he is usually – but not always – right (he wrote before John Ray and Linnaeus laid down a definitive taxonomy) and he even turns nostalgic. In his mid-twenties, travelling in Europe, he often dossed down on makeshift mattresses. The Swiss ones were stuffed with well-frosted beech leaves, soft and pliant, but the Italians ...”

“... of England. Calcium salts have built up and settled in it over the years, so it shows on a chest X-ray. The tubercle bacillus grows very slowly; its epidemics take centuries and the disease it causes is usually chronic. The age of the celebrity sufferer or victim is long since over: George Orwell, Vivien Leigh and Eleanor Roosevelt were the last. It is not ...”

“... portrait of Francesco Arsilli (c.1522) The key to these mysteries is provided by an X-ray fluorescence scan made in about 2014, which reveals beneath the portrait of Michelangelo a well-known composition by the Florentine painter Andrea del Sarto, showing the Virgin and Child with St John the Baptist. The original has been in Rome since about ...”