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“... to global attention was one that Kleitman performed on himself. In 1938 he and a graduate student, Bruce Richardson, descended into the depths of the Mammoth Cave in Kentucky, where they spent the next 32 days a quarter of a mile from the nearest chink of daylight, maintaining an artificial sleep-wake cycle of 28 hours. They kept time with alarm clocks, took ...”

“... and slim, the hips they are attached to as ‘narrow and broad at the same time’. Almost every page amounts to tightrope-walking, whether nonchalant or fraught, but the most obvious consequence of the gender-withholding principle is that A***’s name must be constantly repeated, never allowed to soften into a betraying pronoun. Those recurring rows of ...”

“... Union really a consequence of rumours bouncing around in the ‘echo-chamber’ (the image is from Bruce Chatwin’s Utz) of a society deprived of free speech? How about glasnost? How about the heavy load of bureaucracy and ideology, the apathetic workers, and the ruinous expense of trying to counter (long after that ‘petering out in the ...”

“... in the room turned to stare, gazing at him ‘as if he were a statue’. By now, perhaps, too many page-three captions in the Sun and too many lectures from Andrea Dworkin have taken the impact out of the epithet ‘stunner’ and taught us to think of beauties as passive victims rather than masters of the gaze, but to the Greeks the idea that someone could ...”

“... him.’ From Salieri’s point of view, Les Danaïdes was an unqualified success. On the title-page of the score, printed in Paris shortly after the first performance, Salieri’s name stands alone. Its prominent dedicatory letter, addressed to the Emperor’s sister, Marie Antoinette, ingeniously plays out a further trope on the ‘sous la dictée de ...”

“... seal them for ever. The total report exceeds six thousand pages. We have been shown only the 525-page summary, but any American can read it, and the director of the CIA, John Brennan, offered no challenge to the facts. Exactly 119 detainees were held at CIA sites in various countries from 17 September 2001 to 22 January 2009. It is the first official tally ...”

“... interpreter at the UN accustomed to focusing on the spoken word and immediate comprehensibility. Bruce Penman’s earlier translation, published in 1972, was already more than readable, but Moore goes further in reformulating Manzoni’s elaborate syntax and giving the narrative voice a strong spoken feel. Compare the way the two translators handle the ...”

“... Therefore we pass it around the table and for some time thereafter we throw words all over the page. The facts are political. And it does matter. As Jennifer Dorn makes clear in her introduction to the Collected Poems, Ed published with persons, not publishing houses. There was always a firm engagement, a direct relationship carried through by regular and ...”

“... Beauty, Bluebeard’s wives, the Beast’s Beauty, the Little Mermaid and the Blonde. On every page, off-beat and often surprising variants challenge our assumptions about these old chestnuts. ‘As the beast is to the blonde, so the webbed foot or ass’s hoof of the storyteller is to Cinderella’s glass slipper.’ This wonderfully condensed summary of ...”

“... and unification) and to downgrade domestic Korean developments. It is one of the great merits of Bruce Cumings’s path-breaking work, The Origins of the Korean War (1981), that it reinstates the domestic component, making it possible to evaluate the background and credentials of the main political forces and leaders vying for state power throughout ...”

“... that summer, when a publisher neglected to put the name of the original translators on the title page of a work which Mandelstam had revised, so that he was denounced, unjustly, as a plagiarist. After gruelling court hearings and interrogations, a commission of the Federation of Soviet Writers’ Organisations found him morally to blame for the fact that the ...”

“... training of a trout’, Sandhurst and West Point are not useful frames of reference. Reviewing Bruce Chatwin’s On the Black Hill, John Updike singled out a particular detail as seeming to be ‘miraculously recovered’ from the past – the pink dimple left in the flesh of a man’s neck by the collar stud he has been wearing. Chatwin was reaching back ...”

“... in pursuit of his ancestors. And who were they? ‘Oh, you know (looking seriously) – Robert the Bruce and James Boswell.’ Whether or not there was an ancestral connection, there are passages in the two lives, Lowell’s and Boswell’s, which bear a family resemblance. In the manner of great men, Boswell could be thought mad – by Hume, for instance, and ...”

“... on his promise. Breivik was hard at work on 2083: A European Declaration of Independence, a 1518-page screed exposing the Muslim plot to conquer Christendom. In large part a compendium of extracts from counter-jihadist websites, 2083 was posted online on the day of the attacks under the name ‘Andrew Berwick’, one of Breivik’s several aliases. The signs ...”

“... of crime and the dustbins of showbiz. It’s this (and the look of so many quotations on the page) that makes his work initially inviting and accessible to a general reader like me. He writes with grace and wit and raises the odd eyebrow at those in his profession who don’t, though he can’t be too censorious of jargon, having invented a lot ...”