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“... to Venezuela in the late 1590s, but never again set foot there himself. In 1618 he persuaded King James to let him out of the Tower, where he’d spent 13 years concocting his Guinea Balsam and writing the History of the World under a suspended death sentence. He was allowed a final attempt to find El Dorado, on the outcome of which hung pardon or ...”

“... Maurier’s image of a multiple revenant’. Kim Novak poses as a woman obsessed with ancestors; James Stewart’s Scottie, a mental invalid and an accomplice in murder like so many of du Maurier’s men, tries to transform Novak into the woman he became obsessed with, setting about the task with the rage of a Svengali; ‘no adaptation of a du Maurier novel ...”

“... Golly, what a fearsome sanction.) If we think about it for a moment we remember that he owns the Fox network in America, and 20th Century Fox the film studio, and Fox News the toxic right-wing news channel, the Star satellite network in Asia, and the LA Dodgers baseball team, and part of ...”

“... the prospect of a ‘horrid little parsonage in the desert’. Writing to his curate cousin W.D. Fox, Darwin still professed hopes; privately he doubted that he was moved by the Holy Spirit. The letters bring out nothing so clearly as the social nature of his ‘vocation’. The Church was a safety net for second sons, preventing them turning into wastrels ...”

“... over to women across the political spectrum. Early on some of Trump’s fury focused on the Fox presenter Megyn Kelly, who had questioned him about his derogatory comments about other women’s appearance. He made the bizarre statement on CNN that ‘you could see there was blood coming out of her eyes. Blood coming out of her wherever.’ He also ...”

“... and the house was no longer troubled by spirits. As Clarke points out, this could be an M.R. James or Sheridan le Fanu story. One detail – the house was suspiciously cheap for its size – features in countless modern ghost stories of the Amityville type. There are, according to Clarke, eight main categories of ghostly phenomenon: traditional ghosts ...”

“... critical of the Soviet Union, bitterly disappointing their hosts, were excoriated.Michael David-Fox’s Showcasing the Great Experiment is the story of Soviet wooing of the Western intelligentsia, focusing on VOKS under Kameneva and Arosev. About a hundred thousand foreigners visited the Soviet Union in the prewar period, many of them left-leaning ...”

“... cidevant, and this is bound to affect some of his arguments. A good example is his use of St James, whom he identifies as the brother of Jesus, to distinguish him from the disciples who were also called James. His theory is that the mysterious man who joined the band as they walked from Jerusalem to Emmaus on the day ...”

“... death is fleeing the frame on the right. There are no such illusions – another surprise – in James Tissot’s small, brutal watercolour of an event he witnessed on 29 May 1871. It shows a high wall, part of the fortifications in the Bois de Boulogne, and a man in the uniform of the National Guard plummeting backwards through the air, jacket ...”

“... Am I eccentric?’ Edward James once asked me in the days before I was added to his long list of enemies both real and imaginary. ‘I suppose I am, but I don’t mean to be. I’ve always tried to behave like everyone else.’ We were sitting on the platform of one of the inevitably incomplete concrete follies he was building at enormous expense on a hillside he owned by proxy in a Mexican jungle ...”

“... 7. Enron’s chairman, Kenneth Lay, seems to have developed a joshing intimacy with Bush. Loren Fox reproduces Bush’s 1997 birthday letter to Lay: ‘55 years old. Wow! That is really old. Thank goodness you have such a young, beautiful wife.’ Political links outside the US were also important, particularly in India, where Enron’s massively expensive ...”

“... of Death’s laboratory’. Van Onselen’s long, disturbing and magnificently dogged book, The Fox and the Flies, takes us through a grim terrain spread across three continents, a world of squalor and violence, of prostitutes and pimps, of tenements and penitentiaries – the world of the ‘white slave trade’ – but it is to here that the trail keeps ...”

“... House on 92nd Street, produced a number of so-called ‘journalistic features’ for 20th Century Fox (which were praised by James Agee, among others, for their extensive use of location shooting). De Rochemont was also well connected to various government agencies. The House on 92nd Street dramatised the FBI’s role in ...”

“... imperative of Greenblatt’s opening sentence: ‘Let us imagine that Shakespeare … ’ James Shapiro has no truck with such surmise. Though he too is plagued by the biographer’s hankering to enter the playwright’s mind – ‘to know … what his political views were, whom he loved, how good a father, husband and friend he was, what he did with ...”

“... novel,’ a place full of ‘the imagination of disaster’ – the phrase comes from Henry James – and not just the imagination, we might add. In this light, Trilling then says, we may feel that Tolstoy ‘gives us, after all, not reality itself but a sort of idyll of reality’. This is very intriguing, and a long way – too far, probably – from ...”