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“... to Bloomington, Indiana, where in the Twenties stone-carvers are still needed. She marries a rich young gold-hatted lover who throws himself out of a window; in 1936 she becomes the wife of Barker Flett, 22 years older than herself, an expert on hybrid grains. When her three children are grown she launches for the first time on a career – ‘working outside ...”

“... flickers across her face. That image gives way, quickly and successively, to a series of others: a young black woman smoking, smiling at the camera through a reinforced glass window; three teenage girls in a car, laughing, filmed through the windscreen; a whip-pan to the American flag, pierced by sunlight, drifting in the breeze; a DIY programme on a ...”

“... figure in the New York art world. In 1959 he embarked on a tumultuous love affair with Vincent Warren, the dancer. Through the early 1960s, O’Hara’s commitments at MOMA increased (so did his drinking). He also became a hero for younger Bohemian poets, who moved into New York scenes he’d helped to establish. Even so, until City Lights published Lunch ...”

“... their adversaries, in Braveheart meets Mad Max style), the Rabbits are outlawed and Priest’s young son, Amsterdam Vallon (soon to be Leonardo DiCaprio), is bundled off to a reformatory. In 1862, during the Civil War, the grown-up Vallon returns to the unchanged frontier town of Five Points, still run with an iron cleaver by Butcher Bill. Vallon has ...”

“... When John Curtis left Penguin for Weidenfeld and Nicolson in 1957 (leaving the vacancy that the young Tom Maschler would fill), he was told two things. At Weidenfeld and Nicolson, authority was not devolved via committee: this was George Weidenfeld’s show. Second, Curtis was told, the aim of the house was to ‘open a window to Europe and the world’. So ...”

“... thus inhabited an extremely narrow, self-satisfied and self-righteous little world. Even as a young man, he was conservative, respectable, a Freemason, and a keen, church-going, racial bigot, disliking all non-Wasps. Born in Washington, he went to school there, attended university there, worked there all his life: he left America’s shores just once, for ...”

“... Berets’. The puzzle of what these games do to – or reflect in – the mental habits of their young players has been a subject of fearsome debate in several American universities and in several British courts. Researchers at the University of Missouri-Columbia have devised something they call P300 Response, a way of measuring the emotional impact of what ...”

“... of a Warsaw pogrom: One nude Jew still had his hat, which he modestly held before him. One thin young Jewess, lying on a sidewalk, was helped to her feet by an officer so that she could be knocked down again. That dryness, necessary when things are too terrible for comment, can turn into an almost amused bafflement at things which are too grotesque for ...”

“... might be discriminatory, even between students, we should report it to the head. ‘If you see young kids showing religious affiliations or expressing beliefs – tell someone,’ the woman said. ‘If you see a girl in a headscarf, you must report it.’ We were allowed to talk to the students about religion in our home country, but we couldn’t tell ...”

“... drama narrated in the Sonnets and involving two personalities as well as the poet’s: the ‘fair young man’ and the ‘dark lady’. For a very long time – this approach still dominates at least the more conservative or biographical criticism – the Sonnets have been read as telling some kind of love story, the objects a man and a woman (Sonnets ...”

“... the working class has been an almost complete failure. Green supporters remain disproportionately young, educated, middle-class and female, and it isn’t clear that there is any position on the traditional political spectrum that the party can comfortably occupy. Lucas begins her book by quoting Petra Kelly, one of the founders of the German Greens: ‘We ...”

“... Democratic centrist who has never been an icon of the progressive left like Elizabeth Warren or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. ‘Dumb as a rock’ and ‘low IQ’ – he may be the last person on earth who mentions IQ – had no traction, considering that the stars of MAGA include the congresswomen Lauren Boebert and Marjorie Taylor Greene, with ...”

“... who had hated Johnson from the moment he set eyes on him ten years earlier, when Bobby was a young staffer and LBJ was lording it over the Senate. Bobby desperately tried to persuade his brother that it was a mistake to bring a man he considered a monster into the fold. When that failed he went to Johnson himself to try to talk him out of it. All he ...”

“... playing with toy soldiers in the attic while his parents quarrel downstairs. Away from home, the young Caligula (one source of his nickname, Cal, along with Caliban, whom he once played at school) throws wet fertiliser at his classmates, bloodies their noses, picks his own, sits in a girl’s urine, fingers piles of quicklime. His mother is ‘bored and ...”

“... a mesmerist, who claims he can help her, and seems to do so with the assistance of a medium, a young woman who turns out to be … her lost sister! The confusing difference in their appearance – Catherine’s extremely large feet – is accounted for by her tightrope-walking career. When the Baron discovers Gertie is about to inherit a large fortune he ...”