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“... the restaurant Sexy Fish, all lava-coloured couches, fountains streaming down the windows and a 13-foot Frank Gehry crocodile on the wall. Sexy Fish is the creation of Richard Caring, most famous for the Ivy, the restaurant in Soho that flaunts its exclusivity by being as apparently modest and downbeat as possible. That works for the posh English, but modern ...”

“... panics, his horse bolts, he faints and falls and breaks his hip. When the great surgeon (‘Sir John’) who tends him reluctantly confirms that he will never be able to ride again, Sainty ‘heaved a sigh of unmistakable relief. “Ah! well, that’s a comfort, anyhow,” he said.’ From now on, Sainty’s lameness will be the useful badge of his ...”

“... volumes: the three Forster codices in the V&A (formerly owned by Dickens’s friend and biographer John Forster), for instance, actually contain five notebooks. The largest concentration of notebooks is in the Institut de France in Paris; they arrived in France en masse in the 1790s, Napoleonic booty expropriated from the Biblioteca Ambrosiana. Others are in ...”

“... Years later, when much cream had been spread and rouge faded and money spent, figures such as John Richardson, Graham Sutherland and Bruce Chatwin would have dealings with Helena Rubinstein. Rubinstein trusted Richardson, in as much as she trusted anyone, because he told her that certain paintings in her vast art collection that she believed were ...”

“... too in that you’re not blitzed with information, exhibitions and outreach as soon as you set foot in the door. Here is Collingwood, Nelson’s admiral, and an 18th-century general in the Deccan Rifles, dead on the voyage out; surgeons and solicitors of the town, neat, kneeling Tudors, plump Augustan divines and an atmosphere of piety, property and Pledge ...”

“... Jews to immigrate, but turned down repeated offers of a medal from Israel and refused ever to set foot there again.In the 1950s, Kaminsky established himself as a commercial photographer, with a studio on the rue des Jeûneurs. He took portraits, reproduced artworks and made film stills, collaborating with the set designer Alexandre Trauner on a film by ...”

“... to the university to get a degree. Storey wonders if he might not have absorbed the teaching of John Ruskin, who had urged undergraduates to chivalric derring-do in the waste spaces of the earth. But he arrived too late to hear Ruskin’s famous lecture on the ‘imperial duty’ of founding colonies and the evidence for Ruskin’s impact on his thinking is ...”

“... by acting as mules, delivering packages to safehouses in the US. But the carrying capacity of a foot-slogger is no match for a commercial trailer, or the hydraulic arm of a towtruck, or a hidden compartment in an outsize SUV. The impressive quantities of narcotics confiscated along the US/Mexican border in 2009-10 (three million kilos of ...”

“... a thick turtleneck sweater, highly polished cavalry boots and, draped around his neck, a seven-foot puce muffler knitted by his mother. He refused to use a gas-mask and was twice lightly gassed, earning two of his 20 citations for wounds and decorations for bravery. It is hard to avoid the thought that he wanted bystanders, particularly the newsmen who ...”

“... contemporaneously. But the three officers connected with these documents – Vernon Attwell, John Donaldson and Thomas Style – had signed witness statements in December 1974 stating that the manuscript notes were contemporaneous, and they had repeated this on oath in the trial in 1975. If the rough typed notes were indeed a draft from which the ...”

“... along; my mother is still indignant. (‘I never liked her or her weird diet.’) Said PG was four-foot-ten and 90 pounds – a tiny, frail, somewhat eccentric Jewish-Canadian vegan with gluten allergies who wore rubberised Doc Martens and played the medieval viel. We once visited all the Cathar fortresses together. I miss her a lot sometimes – especially ...”

“... ran to Daniyal and rubbed itself against his leg, making him miss one of the balls. He puts his foot on its head and crushes it. At the sounds of the cracking bones, ‘the Prince’s eyes glanced for one smiling second into those of Gunevati.’ She faints. Daniyal saunters up to Amar as if to start a casual conversation, defying him to object to this ...”

“... groups showing Leonid Ilyich solving engineering problems for an audience of awed scientists, six-foot Brezhnev pencils from the Karl Liebknecht Pencil Factory, Asian rugs embroidered with words of squirming servility, miniature machine tools presented with love from the working people of Krasnodar, a Vietnamese portrait of him wearing a real suit and with ...”

“... Gloucester Crescent gardens. And a proper snake it is, too, a real boa constrictor, all of nine foot long and answering to the name of Ayesha, who has made the journey from Chipping Norton together with her slightly smaller friend and companion Clementine, both in the care of their handler.I have had unfortunate experiences with animal handlers as indeed ...”

“... saying ‘That were foolishness to think’ or ‘Vain is resistance now’ or ‘Art thou firm of foot/ To tread the ways of danger?’ Things tend to happen with noisy ostentation (‘Fast, on the intervening buckler, fell/The Azteca’s stone faulchion’); humdrum thoughts are translated into decorous orotundity (‘Is it a crime/To mount the ...”