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“... liberty and the pursuit of happiness’ begins to fade when he is wrongly suspected of abducting a child, and traduced in the local media. An illegal Chinese immigrant, whose idea of the States is derived entirely from videos, is perplexed to discover poverty and destitution. A woman who conducts virtual city tours for an online realtor (GetaShack.com) finds ...”

“... hardly be accounted a community when the keynote of the book is isolation. Spoon River in Edgar Lee Masters’s book of poems is a place of hypocrisy and double-dealing where only the dead can tell the truth from their graves. Part of the enduring appeal of It’s a Wonderful Life for cinema and television audiences can be put down to its sense of how easy ...”

“... never have occurred naturally.’ This may be the most important point in Rees’s important book. Lee Smolin’s The Life of the Cosmos insists that our cosmos is unified in a way once thought unique to living beings. Einstein’s general relativity is Machian, which means (to use a traditional way of making the point) that it attributes a car’s ...”

“... the ‘born in the wrong body’ mantra which, while deeply felt by many trans people, is also the child of a medical profession which for a long time would accept nothing less as the basis for hormonal or surgical intervention. In the 1960s, the profiles of candidates for medical transition were found to be strangely in harmony with Harry Benjamin’s then ...”

“... were (of course) her parents, her home town of Melbourne and Roman Catholicism. An eldest child, Greer got on unevenly with both her parents, while re-enacting in her own way their respective peculiarities. Her mother Peggy was a one-time milliner who made stabs at reinventing herself by working hard on her tan and sewing unconventional ...”

“... which still dominate the English novel. Heralded by commendatory quotes from Tom McCarthy and Lee Rourke on the cover of this new gathering of previously uncollected or unpublished writings, Ann Quin now seems to be emerging as their best ancestor. She has all the biographical qualifications for the job of precursor, as well as being famously and ...”

“... At best, the incoherence can be interpreted as evidence he’s a gormless, love-hungry 70-year-old child, a sort of feral president, an evil Chauncey Gardiner, as much the dupe in his own confidence scheme as he is its perpetrator, and utterly at the mercy of whichever voice just whispered in his ear. The other possibility, that he’s a totally Machiavellian ...”

“... when everything should have been all right, she went on a family picnic in the western desert; her child picked up a camouflaged bomb and was killed. I hadn’t heard of any of the artists in the Art et Liberté exhibition, which for its stint at Tate Liverpool has been called Surrealism in Egypt (until 18 March). I hadn’t even heard that such a movement had ...”

“... Hong Kong, however, and produced the nearest it has had to a tribune of the people: Martin Lee, now 59, the son of a Kuomintang general who fled to Hong Kong, rather than Taiwan, in 1949. The younger Lee, trained in Lincoln’s Inn, became a leader of the Hong Kong Bar, a member of the Legislative Council, and of the ...”

“... of conscience, a hodge-podge of the stiffest gestures of Gary Cooper and James Stewart. Tommy Lee Jones, the suave gay New Orleans businessman caught up in all kinds of nasty deals, is so deeply untrustworthy that you can’t take your eyes off him; everything he does is full of sleaze and interest. Donald Sutherland, by contrast, as the top military man ...”

“... she displayed were still rare among women, and offended certain contemporaries and rivals. As a child Jane had discovered ‘the dear delight of learning for learning’s sake’: ‘Some half-century ago,’ she remembered, ‘a very happy little girl secretly possessed herself of a Greek grammar. A much-adored aunt swiftly stripped the gilt from the ...”

“... same, Rudolf Klein-Rogge.By 1933 Lang had made his first sound film, M, with Peter Lorre as the child murderer who is caught and tried by criminals rather than cops: the trouble he is causing is bad for business, and the criminals are also full of moral indignation. The film’s original title was Murderer among Us, and the story goes that movie-house ...”

“... divider of Interstate 5: when her fingers were prised loose from the fence 12 hours later, the child pointed out that she had run after the car containing her family for ‘a long time’. All of us are excited by what we most deplore – ‘especially’, as Miss Didion says in another context, ‘if we are writers’. Miss Didion used to be excited by ...”

“... But the situation of the fertile handmaid in Atwood’s novel – forcibly separated from her own child and made to live in the house of a rich man who hasn’t managed to produce babies with his chilly, blonde wife and who regularly rapes her – clearly borrows, as Lewis says, from ‘the historical experience of … the American plantation’ while ...”

“... the lover in the lyric sequence Plain-chant (1923) to the uncanny eyes painted on the eyelids of Lee Miller in his 1930 film Le Sang d’un poète. He kept returning to the pivotal moment in the myth of Orpheus when a sudden, interlocked gaze sends Eurydice back to the unseen shades. Despite the connections, his work is remarkable for its eclecticism: he ...”