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“... an urge to be up and lurking in hot bazaars, fluent in many languages, chewing betel nut with street vendors and taking tea with governors. At some moment in my first decade my inner compass was irretrievably set. Like Auden, who was never not thinking of Iceland, I have never not faced the Orient. Joanna Kavenna’s inner compass also seems to have been ...”

“... Walker – were arrested at Heysham in Lancashire as they got off a train from Birmingham New Street which connected with the ferry to Belfast. A sixth man, Hughie Callaghan, was arrested the next day in Birmingham. The five were taken to Morecambe police station where Dr Frank Skuse, a Home Office forensic scientist, tested their hands for evidence of ...”

“... in a snowfall, were rendered strangely magnetic. Gravity altered. When I went out into the snowy street, everyone I met felt like kin. Most important of all, for those of us who defined everything in terms of relative deprivation, public spaces became places that could be shared. As absurd as it might sound, snow granted us a few days, sometimes even ...”

“... sources, many of whom had just arrived in the country themselves: US generals, UN spokesmen, Sean Penn. President René Préval had more or less retreated, in shock and sorrow and, I imagine, disgust. With just a week in the country – two if they were lucky – reporters tended to take international agencies and organisations at their word, instead of ...”

“... you could see from Wallasey. You could look out across the river at them from the bottom of the street where my grandparents had a B&B – a place of endless passages and landings, or so it seemed, and very different from the Brookers’, though it appears in retrospect to belong to much the same era. My Great-Uncle George, like his late brother, worked for ...”

“... He lived for many years in a penthouse on Fifth Avenue; he now lives in a townhouse on East 92nd Street. He plays jazz clarinet at Michael’s Pub, and rarely misses a game of the New York Knicks. Marion Meade’s new biography is judicious and independent-minded on all the important issues, even-handed without being bland. She hasn’t spoken to Allen ...”

“... own, of which their producers may know little or nothing. It would be impossible to deduce from Sean O’Casey’s anti-political The Plough and the Stars that its author was a Communist Republican. The logic of the play runs athwart the ideology of the dramatist. A text may carry the signature of a particular writer without being truly part of his or her ...”

“... But there is a problem of chronology. Melville wrote ‘Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street’ in the summer of 1853. He did not acquire his copy ‘second hand’ of Poems by James Clarence Mangan, with Biographical Introduction by John Mitchel (1859) until 15 February 1862 – or rather, that is the day on which he wrote his name on it. He read ...”

“... more heavily than the slaughterhouse in the North; that the smashing of plate-glass in Grafton Street windows by unemployed youths, after a H-block march last summer, caused more reverberations than any Belfast baton charge; even that Dr Conor Cruise O’Brien’s repudiation by the world of Irish politics was not due, as he and others supposed, to his ...”

“... get your dick tattooed, but can you get lunch? And should you see a sign on the far side of the street flashing beef – booze – no strings, then you can forget it. The only way to get across the road is to be born there.’ This is humour as the American wisecrack, pacy, racy and histrionically aggrieved. The stand-up wisecrack or snappy one-liner is a ...”

“... is the contingent locale par excellence.’ For Bernard, the elevator is a Benjaminian street brought indoors and rotated on its axis: during the few seconds of ascent or descent, the perpetual ‘anaesthetising of attention’ allegedly required of the city-dweller becomes an acute anxiety. Bernard invokes Erving Goffman’s ethnomethodological ...”

“... 1954, my parents went to Edinburgh on their honeymoon. There is a picture of them taken in Princes Street Gardens, in front of the view of the Castle, my mother is wearing her white fun fur jacket, my father is wearing a big smile; they look full of their moment and altogether content. No one knows why they went to Edinburgh, they just wanted to, and after ...”

“... present in these people’s minds. Meanwhile, over by the windows, in the tartan glory of 23rd Street, other people stood and they stared out at the missing towers, and some of them pointed to the view of the Statue of Liberty and the view of Ellis Island. As I made for the exit, I wondered if any of those at the windows were prompted by the drowned-out ...”

“... course, as the last march I went on was in 1956 and that was by accident: I was standing in Broad Street in Oxford watching the Suez demonstration go by when a friend pulled me in.Today it’s bitterly cold, particularly since the march keeps stopping or is stopped by the police, who seem bored that they’ve got so little to do, the mood of the march ...”

“... poor, romantic Eveline – opts for ‘some domestic form of Home Rule in North Richmond Street’, or ‘alternatively’, if she can be termed ‘an abstensionist’, he is being either fatuous or facetious. The book covers roughly the same ground as ‘ “The Protestant Strain” ’ (playfully subtitled ‘A Short History of Anglo-Irish ...”