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“... aircraft headed heaven knows where into the Brazilian interior – and at one point he raises a glass, like an excited schoolboy, to Adventure. He has learned to tell stories not in newspaper offices but in executive suites. Their occupants – those men who may, just possibly, lend him the money to turn his ideas into ‘light’ – have only a limited ...”

“... she once said. What gets her going is also a matter of chance or luck: Landscape includes a long glass case containing the collection of four, five, six, seven and nine-leaf clovers she began in childhood. The centrepiece of the exhibition is a 56-minute film, Antigone, which explores the gap between Oedipus Rex and Oedipus at Colonus – Oedipus is blinded ...”

“... in areas previously undreamed of. The only reason we have seen the bankers, or Rupert Murdoch or Philip Green having to account for their sins is that they have been summoned by select committees. These days there is even a committee to which the intelligence and security services are supposed to be accountable – an imperfect one (it reports to the prime ...”

“... that have held out against the global trend to market economies and rising living standards,’ Philip Hammond, the chancellor of the Exchequer, noted during his speech in Manchester, ‘but it is only a few. Like Cuba, which I visited last year as foreign secretary, where, curiously, I found cows in the fields but no milk in the shops … That’s what ...”

“... I don’t handle divorce business.’ In general, scholarly investigators should follow Philip Marlowe’s rule. One feels degraded when Dickens’s private letters are subjected to infra-red photographic analysis (as they were in the 1950s). Beneath the crossings-out are references to Ellen Ternan, his mistress – or perhaps not his mistress ...”

“... Imagism comes in too. He looks at a landscape with half-closed eyes through a mist, or in a Claude-glass, or upside down from between his legs; and this is not a good way to read a novel, which is usually better read as if it were a history. Also it is rather unfair to take the chief examples from the Gospels, because there many readers have an extra ...”

“... were also laudatory articles on contemporary architects such as Mies van der Rohe, Walter Gropius, Philip Johnson, Frank Lloyd Wright and Buckminster Fuller. The architects were themselves portrayed as playboys, the architectural and sexual revolutions intimately enmeshed. In Pornotopia, Beatriz Preciado writes that in 1950s issues of Playboy, ‘there were ...”

“... I am cheeriest Crawling around on all fours eating gentle grass And pretending I am eating broken glass. Then I throw up the pasture. Both Plath and Lowell practised something like this detonation of historical pain in the service of intense and unseemly self-regard, and both were attacked for it. Like them, Seidel has anticipated his detractors. He is only ...”

“... And hence the phenomenon of the Royal Joke during which people fall about in near-hysteria when Philip or Charles say something like: ‘If it rains today we could all get wet!’ People then queue up to tell the TV camera about ‘the Prince’s wonderful sense of humour’. More lies, always more lies. The cultural compulsion is truly strong. I was once ...”

“... The number of titles mentioned in contemporary documents – the account books of the impresario Philip Henslowe, the registers of the Stationers’ Company, and so on – far exceeds the number of plays now extant as texts. Many never made it into print. Some did and have since perished: booksellers sold their wares unbound, and plays were often considered ...”

“... It’s like being in a tunnel. Finally I emerge onto the brilliance of the quai, beneath a roof of glass panels which seems to magnify the light. In a short space the time-focus tightens from season to the days of the Parisian rentrée, to a moment in the life of the narrator. The sentence ‘The station is very crowded’ acts as a hinge, referring back to ...”

“... their game. No one was interested enough to go out and take a closer look. One man, indicating his glass of whisky, turned to a bystander and suggested he run along the deck to see if any stray pieces of ice had come on board. Elizabeth Eustis and Martha Eustis Stevenson, sisters from Haverford, Pennsylvania, travelling first-class, were asleep in their ...”

“... active sort, starting when, again for no particular reason, Obbe drowns his hamster in a water glass (‘It’s only a few seconds before he starts to float like a grey air bubble in a spirit level’). The animal is called Tiesey, which was also Matthies’s nickname. Dad tells the children that they shouldn’t let a large rabbit mate with a small ...”

“... kind of novel – a kind which received convincing definition with Excellent Woman (1952) and A Glass of Blessings (1958). Beside their sureness, and lightness, of touch, the other fragments accompanying Civil to Strangers look fumbling and will be of interest to enthusiasts only. ‘Home Front Novel’ records some period detail about the impact of ...”

“... would inherit the townhouse in Bruges. These shrewd operators gathered around the flash and clever Philip, Duke of Burgundy, who was quashing a tradespeople’s revolt in Ghent the year the altarpiece was installed. Despite this, it seems to have been an environment in which artistry and erudition were brought to the fore, and violence and machismo kept ...”