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“... apart from where they happen to find themselves at a particular moment in their lives. Dorothy Jones, a music teacher in an unnamed northern town, has just retired to the nearby village of Weston; or, rather, to Stoneleigh, a new housing development at the top of a hill on its outskirts. Solomon, aka Gabriel, her next-door neighbour, the estate’s ...”

“... to resemble an etching, which is true enough, though it resembles something else even more, as Colin Harrison says in his excellent handbook to Palmer: a carved ivory. The Valley Thick with Corn is one of the most beautiful expressions of what Palmer’s son once astutely noted in his father, ‘a certain sentiment of surpassing fruitfulness’, and its ...”

“... and unimaginative. It was generally felt that the cover was awful. We voted to pulp it and D.A.N. Jones, later of the LRB, walked out. We’d lost the editor. I was asked to take over and with designer Robin Fior looking over my shoulder I wrote: we shall fight, we will win: Paris, London, Rome, Berlin. The vote was unanimous. We were for Utopia. To raise ...”

“... can’t kill them all. When I kill one, I create three.’ I heard that Congressman Walter Jones, Republican from North Carolina and the man who renamed French fries ‘freedom fries’, was now calling for the withdrawal of US troops. I heard him say: ‘The American people are getting to a point here: how much more can we take?’ I heard Congressman ...”

“... their youth and remembering some of the books they read then. There’s Camus and Sartre, Colin Wilson and Lawrence Durrell – not quite the literary equivalent of flares but inducing something of the same incredulity: ‘Did we really read/ wear these?’ I miss the atlas I really wanted and come away with one or two biographies, including a memoir ...”

“... editor, and the project was fortunate to find the ideal man for the job in the Oxford historian Colin Matthew, who had demonstrated his capacity for the task in his monumental edition of the Gladstone diaries. Matthew became the founding editor of the ODNB in 1992, and much of the credit for both the conception and the early stages of execution of the work ...”

“... were imported, and soon fed a brisk black market. The puritanical Welsh photographer Philip Jones Griffiths recorded this cheerful materialism in his classic Vietnam Inc.* These opulent Little Americas were soon surrounded by bars, brothels and laundries, ample cover for infiltrators with explosives and wire-cutters. For the first time the vulnerability ...”