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“... The inspector cautioned her. ‘There is nothing wrong in that,’ Lady Austin retorted. ‘You may think so, but it is what we call real love man for man. You call us Nancies and bum boys but . . . before long our cult will be allowed in this country.’ Lady Austin would have enjoyed Elton John’s ‘marriage’ to David Furnish last year – even the ...”

“... rebellion. ‘The play,’ he averred, ‘was of King Harry the 4th, and of the killing of King Richard II.’ Third, on 18 February, one of the players, Augustine Phillips, in signed testimony given under oath, described the play as ‘the play of the deposing and killing of King Richard II’. Fourth, at Meyrick’s ...”

“... all makes for fiction very different from the kind being written by other Indian writers. Bhaskar may be a Communist, like Picture Singh in Midnight’s Children or Velutha in The God of Small Things, but all he does is deliver the Party newspaper and take part in the street theatre that his unit organises, one or two-act plays which ‘possessed solemn ...”

“... Anglo-German Fellowship. He had several conversations with George VI during the Munich crisis and may well have helped persuade him to back the deal that forced Czechoslovakia to let itself be dismembered by the Nazis. The king was obliged to accept his advisers’ warning not to welcome Neville Chamberlain when he arrived at the airport brandishing the ...”

“... avant-garde – Webern, Boulez and Stockhausen – to which his contemporaries Susan Bradshaw and Richard Rodney Bennett were also drawn. The mecca for music students in those days was Stockhausen’s headquarters at Darmstadt, where the ‘Darmstadt Headbangers’, as Tom Lubbock describes them, treated Britten and Shostakovich with derision as ...”

“... of pater estquem nuptiæ demonstrant; his consequent misfortunes involve him with a villain called Richard Craufurd, whom Bulwer-Lytton based on the banker Henry Fauntleroy, who had been hanged for forgery before a crowd of 100,000 people at Newgate in 1824. The central male figure in Lucretia is an artist, murderer and forger called Gabriel Varney, who was ...”

“... he was bullied and insulted. (An editorial in the Journal of the American Medical Association of 1 May 1937 advised that ‘the proposed Federal venture into the interstate control of cannabis hardly seems to be justified by experience . . . After more than twenty years of Federal effort and the expenditure of millions of dollars, the opium and cocaine ...”

“... debts to Bentham and Mill, even to Arnold, were largely those of a debater who picks up whatever may usefully be gleaned from the other side of a discussion which, in Coleridge on the Imagination, he deliberately took back to first principles. The man who, at the onset of his literary career, had presumed a conflict of Science and Poetry subsequently rewrote ...”

“... the binding, the presence of the original wrappers, the count of plates, and any notes that may have been inserted by former owners or curators. Legman’s 50-page introduction is quirky, reminiscent, indignant, gossipy, truculent and informative, in approximately equal quantities. It is devoted wholly to erotica as articles bought, sold and ...”

“... about obscenity as it has developed over the years has focused on a rather special case, which may be seen as a distinct or third form of harm. This is where the harm doesn’t stop at the person himself, but involves others, just because it consists in a tendency, either new or moulded out of existing traits, to harm others. An example would be where ...”

“... player. Here she meets the dweeby, good-hearted Walter Berglund and his charismatic best friend Richard Katz, lead singer and guitarist of art-punk band the Traumatics. Richard loves Walter because of his moral seriousness; Walter loves Richard because everyone does, including ...”

“... Mr Koch’s novel with a pang – compounded of interest and of its dualistic opposite – which may readily be understood. But then there had been other such pangs as my book drew to a close: every few months came a further contribution – not a few of them from the pen of Martin Amis – to a subject which is widely supposed to be exhausted. To suppose it ...”

“... This book will save your life’: it’s a bold claim. In A.M. Homes’s new novel, Richard Novak has systematically removed himself from the world of human relationships. In the wake of a failed marriage, he moved to Los Angeles and set up a perfectly ordered existence. He stopped going to work years ago; instead, each morning he checks the market while exercising on his treadmill and drinks his special breakfast shakes ...”

“... great metaphysical systems of German Idealism. The challenge consists in the suggestion that we may somehow be locked in by our own limitations, unable to crash through to something with which it is very important to get in touch. In the Middle Ages, it was God who seemed out of reach. Human finitude might, or might not, manage to bridge the gap between ...”

“... the token tenantry of rustic characters, enigmatic, pragmatic, dogmatic, deeply enduring. Readers may detect an odour of Lawrence here and there, or catch a whiff of Cold Comfort Farm: but the scene is deepest Ireland. Onto this pastoral-mythical set Mr McGinley brings the machinery of a plot derived from the parable of the talents. On his 77th ...”