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“... aristocracy of welfare dependence’ – grammar school, Oxford on a grant, the easy-if-you’re-young-and-single 1980s dole. So he’s well read and fittingly self-conscious, aware that the unease he feels is not his alone, but one of the classic modernist positions. He’d like to be ‘no more than a single human man’, in the words of his hero, DHL, but ...”

“... pseudonymous character was first aired in an interview with Rolling Stone’s bumptious but canny young reporter Cameron Crowe; it soon became notorious. Crowe’s scene-setting picture of Bowie at home featured black candles and doodled ballpoint stars meant to ward off evil influences. Bowie revealed an enthusiasm for Aleister Crowley’s system of ...”

“... to their patients. Needless to say, puerperal fever was unknown in home births using midwives. A young Victorian noblewoman who developed a bulge in her abdomen was declared pregnant by physicians who did not feel free to examine her beyond the point of ascertaining that she was a virgin. Virginity was apparently no proof against pregnancy, and good manners ...”

“... which he prefers to call by its former German name, Danzig, is harassed by three women out to rob him – Gypsies, he assumes, who ‘probably lived off hedgehogs baked in clay on an open fire’. Though no Catholic, he responds by crossing himself, at which the women call him a bastard and back off. The novel is more ambivalent than the scene would ...”

“... Easter Sunday fell on April Fools’ Day in 1934. A young woman called Bonnie Parker was sitting in a field by a narrow dirt road near the town of Grapevine, Texas, playing with a white rabbit that she had named Sonny Boy. She was waiting for her mother, to whom she intended to give the rabbit as an Easter present, but the rendezvous got delayed ...”

“... settling at the block because of the largeness of her breasts. A fourth Cenci, Bernardo, too young to be actively involved, was forced to watch the killing of his kin and was despatched to the galleys thereafter. The affair was a cause célèbre, which echoed briefly through the newsletters of the day: ‘The death of the ...”

“... a loyal, indeed patriotic citizen of the Ottoman Empire, which has recently been reformed by the Young Turks. In 1908 their revolution allowed the emergence of political parties, instituted elections and ordained a new pluralist order whereby non-Muslim subjects were elevated into full citizens, who might serve in the armed forces as officers of any ...”

“... the new vision of history as an irrational torrent rather than an orderly stream – seemed to rob its defenders of any capacity to resist. For a class used to being masters of their fate, the revolution was a lesson in human helplessness which left them immobilised for the rest of their lives. Count Bobrinskoy, a rich landowner’s son from the province ...”

“... Liverpool, where Forfar was docked. It was the last contact she would ever have with her troubled young husband. 22a Woodstock Gardens Liverpool Dear Molly This is the first time I had the opportunity to write. I couldn’t send anything as I promised because I got into some trouble and got my pay stopped. I haven’t had the price of smokes since I got ...”

“... for good. ‘Making something of yourself in the world’, as Pelzer sees it, is the only way to rob a sad childhood of its dark victory over your experience. For the newer kind of celebrity, the contemplation of the Nobody years becomes a guaranteed way of justifying the Somebody years and all the excesses that Somebodyhood might involve. Fame finally gets ...”

“... event.’ Right to the end, the Wrights would express worries about things Craig did as a young computer forensics worker. Much of his professional past looked questionable, but in the meeting room at Claridge’s he simply batted the past away. ‘It’s what you’re doing now that matters. I’m not perfect. I never will be … All these different ...”

“... William Carlos Williams was also obsessed with howBeauty should make us paupers,should blind us, rob us – for itdoes not feed the sufferer.Equally, the world that Heaney has been enduring since the mid-Sixties has often exerted a despotic pressure. He is not simply the Keatsian harvester beloved of school examination boards, but a deeply political writer ...”

“... to black Americans. The Monroe Ride was hosted by Robert Franklin Williams. Nicknamed ‘Chairman Rob’ by his supporters, Williams was second only to the Nation of Islam leader Malcolm X as an outspoken advocate of ‘armed self-reliance’. The head of the Monroe branch of the NAACP in the 1950s, he assembled a well-armed militia to defend blacks from ...”

“... called Mr Gopsill wooed her with gifts of a cactus, a velvet duster and a copy of Rob Roy. And a strange flirtation with an older man was echoed in her 1972 masterpiece Harriet Said. This is as powerful an account of corruption as The Turn of the Screw, a tale of temptress girls who string along a middle-aged married man, willing him to have ...”

“... curtains of Irish lace. ‘That dog has no right to be walking over there,’ said the lady. The young man smiled and snapped his fingers. ‘Dog got no sense of history,’ he said, then he laughed. ‘And you got none neither,’ she said, pressing the tissue into her sleeve. Only ten minutes’ walk from the Kennedy house in Brookline, another ...”