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“... them ideal candidates for the part of the first savages to be ennobled by their defeat. In 1547, a young boy from Tenerife was shipped to Paris by the Spanish and given to the French court as a present. His name was Petrus Gonzales, and to the exoticism of his place of origin was added a hereditary condition that made him a natural curiosity. Gonzales was ...”

“... spare five dollars?’) is the familiar disarming overture to vicious subway muggings. A couple of young blacks do indeed approach the stopped Sherman with a deceptively friendly ‘Yo! Need some help?’ and an omnious walk which Wolfe terms ‘the pimp roll’. Sherman feels as generations of blacks must have done when confronted with the white-sheeted lynch ...”

“... years he has watched it all: enclosure, civil war, the church being built, civic organisation, young people getting killed far away, parish do-gooding, village expansion, razed hedges, rising house prices. To him Article 50 would be just a blip. He is ancient and forever young. All this is so unlike what you’d expect ...”

“... said that he once stole an armoured car just to take it for a joyride. He was wild when he was young. By the time I knew him he was a genial elderly truck driver who liked to retell his mother’s stories of growing up in a village in Albania, a country he’d never visited. He was a black sheep, but in the eyes of our not very saintly family he’d long ...”

“... who possessed it. Simone de Beauvoir is said to be ‘naturally’ authentic, which might seem to rob her of the credit she could have earned had she been forced to make herself so. Another of his women, less favoured, is denied the sufficient grace of authenticity, natural or acquired: ‘I see, for example, how L.’s desire for authenticity is poisoned by ...”

“... of political confusion caused by the Glorious Revolution; he backed the winning side, married a young widow with property of her own and settled down as a landsman. This was in 1691. By 1695 Kidd had grown tired of life on shore and he sailed for London, where he hoped to be granted the letters of marque that would allow him to take to privateering ...”

“... Fonda. And then McGuane saw Margot Kidder. It’s like a libertarian Bonnie and Clyde – ‘we rob banks,’ without quite needing the money – and the mood is vital to the 1970s: the people to love faithfully are those you never quite have.Cue Tuesday Weld. Specktor quotes someone saying that if she had settled for being ‘Susan’ Weld (her given ...”

“... another, related feature of his recoil from the world into art. Flaubert often said that even when young he felt old, and one manifestation of this premature withering of the soul was a hyper-developed self-consciousness presiding over all experience. Enclosed within this circle, ‘life’ is both preceded by fiction and destined to become it. This sense of ...”

“... date by accident but soon realises the timing works to his advantage: surely no Black crew would rob the Theresa on Juneteenth. Carney has to ask an earnest young Southerner about the significance of the date, despite his college education. In a sense, Ray is culturally disinherited: his parents, whose own parents left the ...”

“... one of her teachers (‘I suppose I threw myself at him but I hoped not in any obvious way’), a young man of 23, called Steven Weed – not a name that would necessarily wish fame upon itself. He won a teaching fellowship at Berkeley, and she went with him, enrolling as an undergraduate, eventually to do art history – ‘I had been surrounded by art all ...”

“... king. A spectacular example is Ray Dalio, whose story is excellently told in The Fund by Rob Copeland, a reporter at the New York Times who was formerly the hedge fund beat reporter at the Wall Street Journal.Dalio is the founder and principal owner of Bridgewater, the world’s biggest hedge fund. He grew up in a working-class family in Manhasset on ...”

“... this last year discovered had become a distinguished molecular biologist at Edinburgh, but died young (in the 1990s) from Aids.17 January. Rupert returns from a walk with Owen, his brother, and son Freddy (five), worried because he had been unable to resist giving Freddy a kiss. Freddy is still at infants’ school. Had Rupert been vaccinated when I was, we ...”

“... over their heads; they sign on freely and fearlessly to terrorise against the war, competent to rob at gun-point, equipped in every way to maim and kill with explosives, undeterred by fear or doubt or inner contradiction – girls in hiding, dangerous girls, attackers, implacably extremist, completely unsociable. Any writer charged with reviewing a Roth ...”

“... didn’t last, but Jean did secure two long interviews with the man himself, and she told the young editors George Plimpton and Robert Silvers that she would give the interview to the Paris Review, so long as they made her an associate editor. They took the material (Number 12 in their famous series ‘The Art of Fiction’) and Stein got her place on the ...”

“... visit to Turkey in early March in order (they feared) to enlist Turkish support in his bid to rob them of their quasi-independence within Iraq. Above all, the Kurdish leaders fear that Jaafari is manoeuvring to avoid implementing an agreement under which they would gain permanent control of the oil province of Kirkuk, which they captured at the start of ...”