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“... an exemption from the arcane law against cross-dressing; for her grandest composition, the 17-foot long Horse Fair, she attended the equine auctions near the Salpêtrière on Wednesdays and Saturdays, always disguised as a man. Unveiled at the Salon of 1853, Horse Fair was hailed as a ‘picture of the century’; it toured widely in Britain and the ...”

“... system for reading Egyptian hieroglyphic writing, derived from the Rosetta Stone. He finally set foot in Egypt in 1828, on an expedition sponsored by the Duke of Tuscany, and felt ‘as if he had come home’. His ‘swarthy complexion and excellent Arabic meant that he could easily pass for a native’, Wilkinson writes, echoing Champollion’s own claim to ...”

“... looking at Michael’s hands on the wheel and thinking how much nicer they are than my hands.*‘John Lennon,’ Michael said. ‘That’s the first thing Mum remembers, him being shot.’I said, ‘Is it?’‘Well, that’s what you told me.’Maureen is doing her homework. ‘It’s Miss Macaulay,’ said Michael. ‘Milestones. We did it two years ...”

“... in which Powell pays tribute to the ‘insight’ and ‘courage’ of his fellow Black Country MP John Stonehouse, soon to become postmaster general and then regarded as a coming man in the Labour Party, perhaps even a future leader. Stonehouse had denounced as ‘a canker’ the campaign by local Sikh bus conductors to be allowed to wear their turbans at ...”

“... the architectural history of various subway systems and the theory of names as it developed from John Stuart Mill to Saul Kripke, with, by way of comparison, a solid account of necronym taboos among various tribes. Films, photographs and museum exhibits are everywhere used in evidence, as is an enormous range of recondite archival material. As the founder ...”

“... But even ‘figure’ seems too fixed a term for the melancholic, at times clownish narrator. John Berryman – one of Housman’s most creative readers, working him deeply into the fabric of The Dream Songs – catches something Housmanish in his prefatory disclaimer: ‘The poem then, whatever its wide cast of characters, is essentially about an ...”

“... those low pentagonal stools on the sloping rubberised side of which the customer placed his or her foot, over which Aunty’s head would be reverently bent about to unlace the shoe. Coyly she looks up. ‘Have I,’ she says in those exaggeratedly correct tones of which she was so proud and which marked her out as a professional woman, ‘Have I the pleasure ...”

“... there was light, power, a swift transaction involving tokens, a set of escalators, and at their foot, the familiar declining whine of a clean, brightly lit underground train. We got in; the carriage was full of neatly dressed Armenians who were, in spite of everything, going somewhere – commuting. We travelled two stops, to the centre of town. I ...”

“... years without carving in an Africanesque mode before returning to the fold to fashion the ten-foot-high King of Kings (c.1938, now in the Guggenheim Museum, New York) with no self-consciousness, it seems, quite possibly sculpting to jazz, since he’d built up a first-rate record collection, mainly of blacks (including Ellington, Louis Armstrong, Fletcher ...”

“... House (where I do not pee). It’s the home of the Lascelles family, an ancestor of which, John Lascelles, blew the gaffe on Catherine Howard, the king’s fifth wife, but was later culled himself in the purge of evangelicals during that dreadful monarch’s last years. I watch two of the now well-established red kites tumbling about the sky above the ...”

“... 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 ...”