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“... thanks largely to the posthumous revelations about the Belgian-American literary theorist Paul de Man. But what about the ordinary people of the Low Countries? Hugo Claus’s The Sorrow of Belgium, a novel first published in Holland in 1983, presents a world in which collaboration with the Nazis is made to seem as inevitable as breathing. The ...”

“... At the corner of Marsham Street and Horseferry Road stands the new Home Office building, designed by Terry Farrell and Partners. It was opened in 2005 and everything still looks just as it should. Along the Marsham Street frontage big plinths present crisp rectangles of grass and brimming water, orderly packages of the organic ...”

“... need for repressing counter-revolution has passed,’ and hoped that a thaw might be round the corner. They believed that the Soviet model of Communism was reformable, and that Marxism – even Leninism – did not have to be Stalinism or incompatible with free speech and civil rights. They knew they were being lied to, day after day, and yet, offered the ...”

“... intimate disorder – drawers are half-open, books casually abandoned, canvases stacked up in the corner – and two paintings hang on the wall: animated, semi-abstract landscapes that resemble some of Cooke’s own work. Under the straight frame of one of the paintings, the top of the sofa sags in a comfortable arc. Boredom, abundance, domesticity: it could ...”

“... in Walthamstow, Purley, Stanmore, Royal Oak, but Gutshot was the biggest and the least hole-and-corner. I played there, week in week out, until the club closed at the end of last year. Gutshot had always been operating outside the law, and everyone knew it. The gaming laws made no distinction between poker and other games of chance; anyone who wanted to ...”

“... direction of Heaton were half full in the morning and nobody spoke. When I arrived at the house of Paul Wakefield I immediately saw a picture of his handsome younger brother on the coffee table. ‘He was my bodyguard,’ Paul said. ‘He was always quite tough, but brave. He was my hero and he always will be.’ ...”

“... and Hitler, whose world-shaking career of war, genocide and destruction lasted a mere 12 years. Paul Preston’s massive biography, on which he has worked for many years, is not, he writes in his Prologue, ‘a history a 20th-century Spain nor an analysis of every aspect of the dictatorship, but rather a close study of the man’. Franco was born and raised ...”

“... on the outskirts of Berlin. The murderer was presumed to be a man she met through a personal ad, Paul Kuhnt, who made off with her keys and plundered her apartment. He was tried for her murder but not convicted. Carrington uses the case notes from the murder investigation to bring to light experiences that don’t usually make it into history ...”

“... what I loved most was the drinks and the smokes and the endless talk, and the fact that on every corner there was a room where people auditioned for parts that didn’t exist.I was a founder member of Soho House, and so part of the gang that drove ‘old Soho’ away. But as usual it’s not that simple. At first, before the move into beach condos, Soho ...”

“... Kray did shock him. Just once. An unforgettable occasion. A motor eased alongside Tony at the corner of Blythe Street, Bethnal Green. Ron and Reg were inside, keeping company with a known associate, Dickie Morgan. Reg was nicely cased in a blue three-piece by Woods of Kingsland Road. Dickie matched him. (The Twins were very influential that way. All the ...”

“... routine ingenuity. If Riffaterre holds out for the virtues of a disciplined, methodical criticism, Paul Fry has arguments in plenty for doubting that method can ever be more than a delusive dream. His book is a sustained and elegant meditation on the limits of formalist theory, the ways in which reading confounds or eludes the rules laid down by ...”

“... left to right, husband Henry to little Bobby. The shot is framed by two trees; in the upper right corner, a group of smiling shoppers coming through the lot balances the family in the lower left. Tall, masculine Henry is exquisite in camel-hair overcoat and a polo-neck in the same Christmas green as the pine needles. In the centre his wife, Betty, holds baby ...”

“... quite go away. In this early work – written in the 1940s – Paz is thinking of something like Paul Valéry’s idea of what is ‘given’ in a poem and what is made, what seems to come from a place that is not the writer’s mind, and what is manifestly a matter of craft and labour. ‘The gods give us a certain first line for nothing,’ Valéry ...”

“... in the intricacies of human nature. I had pals, good pals, and as a resident smoker at the corner and a fearless talker-back to the nuns, I was in a position to feel confident about their loyalty when we came before Mr Scullion, the chief lion at the gym hall. Not a bit of it. No sooner had Scullion given some Kenny Dalglish-in-the-making the chance of ...”

“... itself a demonstration of how far the balance of power has swung against the US. Twelve months ago Paul Bremer, the US viceroy, was blithely talking about continuing the occupation for two years. His first act on arriving in Iraq was to disband the Iraqi army and security forces. The state machinery was dismantled. Direct imperial rule seemed feasible to ...”