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“... of Franco’s much deeper and broader bloodbath. Malraux, Sartre, Jorge Semprun, Laurie Lee, Victor Serge, Luis Buñuel and of course Orwell have their pages, but for a change – almost welcome – Hemingway and Gellhorn are absent. Instead, the American witnesses chosen by Ayrton are John Dos Passos and Muriel Rukeyser. Ayrton’s selections don’t ...”

“... Others then and since have commented on the refiguring of the German language under the Nazis. Victor Klemperer kept himself sane during the war years partly by collecting notes for what would eventually be published in 1947 as Lingua Tertii Imperii, a study of language under the Third Reich, and in Austerlitz W.G. Sebald discusses the bureaucratese of ...”

“... the past, would-be biographers have been discouraged from poking their noses into the business of David Cornwell, the former spy who has written under that curious pseudonym since 1961. Robert Harris chose not to proceed, for reasons that are hinted at but not made clear in this book, while in the early 1990s the journalist Graham Lord withdrew under a heavy ...”

“... got properly started before it begins to show signs of not going on for ever. So when I read in David Plante’s Difficult Women (1979) that Sonia Orwell in her final years complained to him, ‘I’ve fucked up my life. I’m angry because I’ve fucked up my life,’ it doesn’t seem to me necessarily to imply a particularly tragic or wasted life. At ...”

“... politics, then? Not exactly. ‘He was his party’s most fertile ideas man at Westminster since David Lloyd George, perhaps since Gladstone,’ Barberis blurts out in his final section, almost as though he has just thought of it, reassuring himself by adding: ‘That is what he was – an ideas man, not a political philosopher or even the careful crafter of ...”

“... a gallery that Kasmin had. Born in 1934, Kasmin had worked from 1956 to 1958 at Gallery One under Victor Musgrave, a true pioneer who in the 1950s was the first dealer in London to show Yves Klein and the Fluxus group and (at Kasmin’s suggestion) Henri Michaux and in 1962 gave Bridget Riley her first exhibition. Kasmin’s subsequent positions included a ...”

“... adolescent. Then, among the younger contingent, there was George’s elder brother, Prince Albert Victor, Duke of Clarence, congenitally listless, almost illiterate, vacant and effete. For a time, he and George shared the same girl in St John’s Wood. ‘She is a ripper,’ George recorded. Some, of course, felt the same about Clarence. His intended consort ...”

“... turned critical of the Soviet Union, bitterly disappointing their hosts, were excoriated.Michael David-Fox’s Showcasing the Great Experiment is the story of Soviet wooing of the Western intelligentsia, focusing on VOKS under Kameneva and Arosev. About a hundred thousand foreigners visited the Soviet Union in the prewar period, many of them left-leaning ...”

“... he is of ‘lesser worth’. The same kinds of thing, Weber suggests, happen after a war: The victor will of course assert, with ignoble self-righteousness: ‘I won because I was in the right’ . . . When the horrors of war cause a man to suffer a psychological breakdown, instead of simply saying, ‘It was all just too much for me,’ he now feels the ...”

“... media ubiquity without being turned on, in one way or another – whether they’re Tony Blair, David Beckham, Princess Diana or Kate McCann. For Burn, celebrity is an irresistible force that always leads to obscenity and violence. Written hard, in a style that bears the clear influence of Martin Amis, his second novel, Fullalove (1995), is the memorable ...”

“... in 1914), the great moments of unanimity have taken place at public funerals – like those of Victor Hugo, Pierre Overney, Jean-Paul Sartre, or Edith Piaf. Sunday’s demonstration is of the same order, the crowd is moved by sentiment and satisfied by coming together to express a vague desire for unity and reconciliation. As if the strength of the crowd ...”

“... in 2010, isn’t present. After a Saturday bullfight in Valladolid, I went to Tordesillas with David Penton, secretary of the Club Taurino of London. He is something of a hero there for his defence of the toro de la vega, the bête noire of the anti-bullfighting lobby. There was to be a parade lit by lanterns that evening, and a toro de la vega on ...”

“... business: theirs was to pay and obey. Their leaders promised not to repeat their lèse-majesté. David Landes takes the story from the scholar of Islam, Michael Cook. It is, for him, a moral tale. Autocracies squeeze, steal and demean. ‘Only societies with room for multiple initiatives,’ he insists, ‘from below more than from above, can think in terms ...”

“... the BBC when Alan Yentob insisted that an aristocratic ex-Battle of Britain pilot be played by David Jason; ITV loved it, but made similar demands. Eventually, back at the BBC, the play got its perfect casting – Albert Finney, Tom Courtenay and Joanna Lumley – and was ‘bought’ in 1998 by the then BBC2 controller Mark Thompson for broadcast at ...”

“... Hendrix noted in his diary after their first, brief meeting. ‘She just knocked me on my ass,’ David Crosby said after hearing her sing ‘Both Sides, Now’. ‘It was the highest quality of songwriting. I liked her better than Dylan.’ Crosby briefly became Mitchell’s inamorato and produced her first album. Leonard Cohen, another influential early ...”