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“... towards Brindisi. The boat was crewed by members of Italy’s Guardia di Finanza. It was fifty foot or so, with two powerful engines which threshed up the water like a harvester, cutting a straight path visible for half a mile behind us through the rolling waters. The moon, too, threw a line of light, brighter, narrower, scuffed at its edges by the winter ...”

“... vision of the domestic and of love to the one he has known before: when Liza hears the Captain’s foot on the stair, ‘suddenly her eyes lighted up, as though she had been brought into a room hung with baubles and mystery packets.’ But Victor, already marked down in life as a loser (at school, paradoxically, his name singles him out as a wet and ...”

“... auction, as expected, was the Jean Louis sheath dress, covered in tiny stones, worn by Marilyn at John Kennedy’s birthday tribute in 1962, when she sang ‘Happy Birthday’. This went for over a million dollars. The man who bought it (owner of a memorabilia shop called Ripley’s Believe It or Not) thought he’d got a great bargain. The Kennedy dress ...”

“... close to his hero, not sentimentalising him or obscuring his weaknesses. Hobbled with a withered foot, a ridiculous mother, and an encumbered estate, Byron fought tenaciously while at Harrow for status. Inheriting a title without a suitable income at the age of ten could have been mortifying, but Byron spent his puberty acting the part of a peer for all it ...”

“... to be despised when great enterprises of bombing, destabilisation and secret diplomacy were on foot. It’s the unchanging, minatory rhetoric of the reactionary veteran and Freikorps man; doubly objectionable in one who had seen so little service. Kissinger’s fear of weakness and humiliation, and his pathetic adoration of the winning or the stronger ...”

“... could lift a shot glass without spilling half of its contents. The ride to the tunnel haunts Kray foot-soldier Tony Lambrianou like a psychogeographical nightmare. The route he drove that fated night is a mantra he can never stifle: Evering Road, Lower Clapton Road, Narrow Way, Mare Street, Cambridge Heath Road, Commercial Road, East India Dock ...”

“... were not a product of the American distraction factories, but originated in Manchester in 1889. John Tiller, cotton trader by day and musical impresario by night, had noticed that the effect of chorus dancers was marred by lack of discipline and, we must suppose, solved the problem by applying proto-Taylorian Mancunian production techniques. Everyone from ...”

“... on her work as worthy of parody – not just recognisable, but recognised. When Thomas Hardy, John Masefield and Walter de la Mare secured her a civil list pension in 1923, Mew couldn’t decide whether it was more ‘like a dream or a nightmare’. Such diffidence also contained defiance. Her public readings were bracing affairs – ‘like having ...”

“... months earlier, and the US air force and Iraqi army bombardment drove out the rest. In cars or on foot, thousands moved east towards Baghdad or across Anbar province. There were few reporters around to film or catalogue their plight. Unlike the displaced residents of Aleppo, who could be described as the victims of Russian and Syrian government ...”

“... elbow, talking incessantly in an incomprehensible accent. Ford, it would seem, could barely set foot outside his front door without importunate persons of one kind or another falling in beside him. When he lived in Holland Park Avenue, he would take his morning walk with Ezra Pound at one elbow, barely visible beneath an immense sombrero, and at the other ...”

“... with the publication in 2003 of its magisterial sixth volume, written by the general editor, John Baker, and covering the years 1483-1558. It then went back to the beginning, with R.H. Helmholz’s opening volume on early canon law. The rest was silence, until in 2010 the series sailed suddenly and magnificently into port without any of the remaining ...”

“... a Bothy Nicht at the Imperial Hotel in Aberdeen where he heard the ballad singing and stories of John Strachan, an Aberdeenshire farmer who became one of his most important sources. In ‘Journey to a Kingdom’, an unpublished poem written in 1938, Henderson leaves no doubt that these northern excursions were conscious acts of homecoming. In the summer of ...”

“... you can’t bring yourself to love it. It’s a position that has its advocates. A few years ago, John Mueller’s Atomic Obsession: Nuclear Alarmism from Hiroshima to al-Qaida urged a relaxed attitude: far more has been spent on nuclear weapons than can be justified by any sensible political strategy; they aren’t of much military use; their proliferation ...”

“... with death one day’. Hamsun had almost no direct knowledge of England. The only time he set foot there was to catch the train from Hull docks to Liverpool, on his way from Oslo to America in the 1880s. But it may well be that had he known the country better it would have made little difference; On the Cultural Life of Modern America (1889) is full of ...”

“... as a newsworthy invader of this retreat. A few years back, when the dead-windowed block at the foot of the park was still the Queen Elizabeth Hospital for Children, a giant Mickey Mouse was choppered in to put the frighteners on the sick kids. And also to act, if only we had recognised it, as a premature ambassador for the coming corporate bonanza. The ...”