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“... I have come to recognise, even if I don’t easily accept, that borders are places of risk and we cross them at our peril. They are sacred, ‘set apart’, defined precisely by division, which is the reason we hold their defence to be sacrosanct. We teach ourselves the limits of our lives by beating the bounds, literally so, in the past; today, mostly ...”

“... reflex, the Agatha Christie cornerstone, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. Or as Derek Raymond (Robin Cook) frequently proclaimed, paraphrasing Edmund Wilson: ‘who gives a fuck who killed Roger Ackroyd?’ Raymond, attempting in The Hidden Files to define the ‘black novel’ in which he specialised, glossed the Jamesian school as ‘pretentious escapist ...”

“... her way in 1916 to the battlefields of France, where she drove an ambulance for the American Red Cross. Between runs to the trenches, she shared a flat in Montparnasse with several other girl-drivers, one of whom, Dolly Wilde, louche niece of Oscar and member of the expatriate lesbian circle around Natalie Barney, became an early and important love. Wilde ...”

“... for six years.These proposals and arguments came up against powerful social and political cross-currents. Patronage networks founded on kinship or friendship were deeply entrenched, complicating notions of public trust and blurring the boundaries between public and private. Opportunities to rise through examinations, or retire with pensions, were very ...”

“... mouth to defend against foreign incursions. To mark the occasion the Le Moyne brothers put up a cross and slaughtered a buffalo. Nearly twenty years passed before the French crown could be persuaded to build a city on the Mississippi. Bienville, by then governor of Louisiana, proposed building New Orleans along the natural levee near Bayou St John; he had ...”

“... the stream of an exhausted linear time that is about to peter out. Brilliantly tracking the criss-cross implosion of themes, Auerbach doesn’t quote more than she has to. One barrier, I think, to du Maurier’s recognition as a serious writer has been her indifference to the raw material of language. Editors at Gollancz had to rewrite for grammar and ...”

“... wrote, ‘for heaven’s sake keep clear of this town, unless you have an awful lot of money.’ Robin Redgrave was frantically trying to stave off bankruptcy and praying that Micheline’s lifelong friendship with Rica Antonescu, wife of the general-dictator, might afford the family some protection. At 11 p.m. on 9 February 1941, the telephone rang in their ...”

“... has a border with Romania and everybody is worried that the man on the radio is going to cross it with his Panzer tanks so he can continue eastwards to make one really big, joined-up ‘living space’. In Vienna, they say, many shops are displaying three maps showing what this will look like: the first map is titled ‘THE GERMANY WHICH WAS’, the ...”

“... it had reached 50p and £1. To some extent he shaped his price to the customer, though not in a Robin Hood sort of way, the poorer customers often getting charged more, and any attempt to bargain having the same effect. I have two American clocks, both in working order, that were five shillings apiece and an early Mason’s Ironstone soup dish that cost ...”

“... uncle and nephew has been so contrived as to conceal the fact that the interlocutors speak at cross-purposes throughout. A single ‘he’ or ‘she’ would give the game away, but no single ‘he’ or ‘she’ is uttered. It is the husband and not the wife who is going mad and has been under Sir Alington West’s scrutiny at the dinner-party. And ...”

“... a circle of butter. This is the poem in full:Who carved on the butter print’s round open faceA cross-hatched head of rye, all jags and bristles?Why should soft butter bear that sharp deviceAs if its breast were scored with slivered glass?When I was small I swallowed an awn of rye.My throat was like standing crop probed by a scythe.I felt the edge slide and ...”

“... from what we might call their apparent ordinariness, and only occasionally, as with Jim Carrey or Robin Williams, does an actor come along who seems to have the superhuman plasticity of a cartoon. These movie actors, whatever else they happen to be, are works of animation: they can make their faces, and their emotions, do anything, and they live their ...”

“... trail. Would Labour’s disaster of 5 May have happened if any of its best and brightest – Robin Cook, Douglas Alexander, Alistair Darling, Gordon Brown, even John Smith – had stayed in Scotland to lead the party and the devolved government at Holyrood? Only Donald Dewar took the train back north and became first minister of Scotland in 1999. It ...”

“... only major public commission the Smithsons had to wait until the late 1960s, when they built the Robin Hood Gardens estate in Poplar, East London. An attempt to create Corbusian ‘streets in the sky’ and put their social theories into practice by force majeure, it had a certain conceptual dignity but was never a practical success. Soon after it was ...”

“... it. For these years are an extraordinary saga of unhappening. Again and again, Henry plans to cross over to France to recover the lands in Normandy and Anjou that his father lost, but every time the expedition is aborted, usually for lack of funds – in 1223, 1226, 1227 and 1229. In 1230, Henry does get as far as Nantes, where he dallies, according to ...”