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“... when it came to easel painting with intellectual credibility. Paint serious, paint big! An 11-foot-tall Democritus in Meditation (presently in Copenhagen) was unveiled, littered with skulls, moonstruck clouds and carefully researched antique curios. Ricciardi, the writer friend who had supplied the erudition, was plugged for further themes: ‘Now that ...”

“... Madame Bovary: some translations need as long as the book itself took to write, a few even longer. John Rutherford’s magisterial version of Leopoldo Alas’s La Regenta – a kind of Spanish Bovary – cost him, according to his calculation, five times as many hours to translate as it had taken Alas to write. ‘Translation is a strange ...”

“... and injustices on excessive state interference in free market mechanisms – the ‘visible foot’ stamping on the ‘invisible hand’. His son, a tall young man with a long ponytail, joined us. I asked him what he did, and he replied with a grin: ‘I am a muckraker.’ He went on to explain that he was a journalist on one of the bold new ...”

“... on the Democrats for congressional support. Elite leadership of the Republican Party collapsed. John McCain chose the shockingly unqualified Sarah Palin as a running mate in the 2008 election because she was hugely popular with the Republican base, who revelled in the outrage she triggered among liberals. Barack Obama’s victory in that election only ...”

“... material of the book could just as well have formed the basis of a very different sort of work. John Betjeman picked up on this odd and wholly characteristic ambivalence when he wrote to congratulate him: ‘When I read the book it seemed to me so rockingly funny that nothing else would seem funny again.’Decline and Fall is one of a number of Waugh’s ...”

“... X when he ghosted his autobiography? To what extent did Ted Sorensen create the verbal manner of John F. Kennedy when he wrote Profiles in Courage, a book for which the future president won the Pulitzer Prize? And are the science fiction stories H.P. Lovecraft ghosted for Harry Houdini not the best things he ever wrote? There would be a touch of all this in ...”

“... introduced himself and his two colleagues of the tribunal, Justices William Hoyt of Canada and John Toohey of New South Wales, the last a member of a well-known Catholic family of lawyers, journalists and brewers. All three wore business suits and asked occasional sharp questions. Behind the bench loomed the ninety-odd volumes of Widgery Tribunal ...”

“... it instead, colliding with the air molecules in its path at a pressure of about 2lb per square foot. The assaulted air shook, and gave up the dose of extra energy as sound. Concorde climbed on, dragging its sack of reverberating noise behind. There is, of course, no such thing as the sound barrier. What there is, is the aerodynamic challenge of the ...”

“... of work on the hydrogen bomb to set out his case. He entrusted extracts to the Princeton physicist John Wheeler to check the accuracy of his account of the Teller-Ulam design. Intending to read the document on the overnight train from Princeton to Washington, Wheeler managed to lose it. The sleeper car was taken apart in a desperate search, but the document ...”

“... was a good little thing, she said, anxious to please. He polished her shoes and brought her little foot-stove in the morning, to warm her legs when she heaved out of bed. Simon was a heavy drinker, unpredictable and sometimes violent. His tuition seemed to consist in teaching the boy to sing Revolutionary songs and repeat coarse jokes about the three women ...”

“... her young before her face. Who scapes the lurking serpent’s mortal sting? Not he that sets his foot upon her back. The smallest worm will turn, being trodden on, And doves will peck in safeguard of their brood. You feel he only stops because he has run out of animal comparisons. It took a while for this manner to change. King ...”

“... see what would happen,’ he recalled, ‘as once on a time I short-circuited a dynamo with a two-foot length of wire held between the brushes.’ Most of this first volume covers the period in which Frost’s career finally took off. The letters don’t just talk about the poems; in the tones they take and the figures they make, they bring the poetry to mind ...”

“... left to the imagination about what could happen if a mistake on the order of 1914 were made again. John Kennedy read The Guns of August as a parable of the Cuban Missile Crisis. ‘I am not going to follow a course which will allow anyone to write a comparable book about this time [called] “The Missiles of October”,’ his brother Robert quotes him as ...”

“... procedures. Also about painters he admires (Titian, Rembrandt, Velásquez, Ingres, Matisse, Gwen John) and those he doesn’t: da Vinci (‘Someone should write a book about what a bad painter Leonardo da Vinci was’), Raphael and Picasso. He prefers Chardin to Vermeer, and dismisses Rossetti so violently as to induce pity. He is not just ‘the worst of ...”

“... she purchased an estate for herself and Garbo in Beverly Hills – it had a croquet lawn, a ten-foot-high privacy fence and separate entrances. In this fantasy retreat, which Garbo rejected peremptorily as soon as the work was done, saying she vanted a tennis court instead of a stoopid old cwoquet lawn, one sees de Acosta’s pathology writ large. What she ...”