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“... well find this second section episodic, and something of an indulgence on Grass’s part, his own licence to comment on a variety of topical events, from television culture to the assassination of the Treuhand chief Rohwedder: repetitive as well, since we tend to get everything in multiple forms, recapitulated by Fonty’s own letters on these subjects and ...”

“... small, five foot one and three-quarter inches tall, which she fudged on her California driver’s licence as five two. She weighed nothing. Somewhere there must be a photograph of her beaming with delight but I’ve never seen it. With age, her neck thinned. Her arms were like birds’ legs. Her face shrank tight in lines and folds, creases deepening around ...”

“... Lowell appears to have been conscious of this connection. The idea was also joined to that of a licence to offend: an antinomian connection about which the Lowell of the writings was largely but not entirely silent. Such speculations put together the life and the work. They would not get far with those whose stress fell on a severance between the poet and ...”

“... During the long years of the 20th century’s newspaper boom, that monopoly was the proverbial licence to print money. It was this gushing faucet of classified revenue which allowed the elaborate superstructure of American newspapers to develop. The well-staffed offices, the air of self-conscious seriousness shading into pomposity, the tendency to file ...”

“... Canning and Lords Eldon, Liverpool and Sidmouth. There were fellow poets such as Felicia Hemans, Tom Moore, Samuel Rogers, Sir Walter Scott and Robert Southey; artists of various kinds including the gifted amateur Sir George Beaumont, Francis Chantry, John Constable, Thomas Lawrence, James Northcote and John Soane; and from the theatre, Jack ...”

“... led to the 2022 sequel which was such a big-screen success that Steven Spielberg recently told Tom Cruise his movie had ‘saved the entire theatrical industry’. It’s the Thanh Hóa Bridge’s world – we’re just living in it.)From this point on, the US military was committed to the microchip as a central part of its strategic planning. The Soviet ...”

“... pure ignorance and crass violence, by banging his head against it. The need to buy a stamp or a TV licence or fill in a form is often too pressing, the queues too long, the malady of the quotidian too richly detailed to be bothered by heroes. If I walk down to the Bank of Ireland at the corner of Westland Row and Pearse Street, which I do regularly, I hardly ...”

“... telling examples. Mr Casaubon is selfish, Rosamond Vincy is selfish, her brother Fred is selfish, Tom Tulliver is selfish, Harold Transome is selfish, Esther Lyon starts out to be selfish but is saved in time by Felix Holt. On the other side of the ledger, Maggie Tulliver is unselfish, Mary Garth is unselfish, the Dissenting minister Rufus Lyon is a pillar of ...”

“... years ago has now well and truly arrived in Whitehall. The pandemic gave the PM and his ministers licence to address us directly almost daily, even when they had nothing very new or very true to tell us. Now it looks like becoming a permanent feature.The new arrangements got off to a sticky start. No sooner was the chamber unveiled than Johnson abandoned his ...”

“... before I gather up the coins, a pause which the waiter, still unsmiling, chooses to interpret as a licence to take the money as a (very generous) tip. I’d have felt better about myself if I’d protested. As it is I come out feeling both cheated and a coward.12 September. Labouring along Gloucester Avenue on my bike I see run across the road and just miss a ...”

“... used to – or I used to be used to. I feel the need to be mobile.’ I raise the matter of a licence and insurance, which she always treats as tiresome formalities. ‘What you don’t understand is that I am insured. I am insured in heaven. ‘She claims that since she has been insured in heaven there has not been a scratch on the van. I point out that ...”

“... it. The example he gives is the abluted Croatia of tomorrow. This is an argument first made by Tom Nairn about Bosnia, in much the same tension of grief and realism. The extension of Garton Ash’s range to the Balkans thus involves more than a geographical move. It represents an intellectual and moral enlargement. But by the same stroke, it throws into ...”

“... the wrong moment to provoke him – he’d been buying booze for a friend. After he got out on licence in March, seven years in to a thirteen-year sentence, he went camping with his brother and had a little drink. The tag alerted his probation officer; since he didn’t do anything bad while he was tipsy, he wasn’t sent back to prison, but the threat of ...”