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“... 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 ...”

“... they lived mostly in expatriate circles, but their friendships with other foreigners, including John McNair, the ILP representative in Barcelona, were rewarding. Lois was close to Eileen O’Shaughnessy (‘nice but very vaguish when she talks and is eternally smoking cigarettes’), who spent most of her time in the city while Orwell was at the front. In ...”

“... also produced the first of the notorious Nobel injustices: Charles Best did not get the Prize; John Macleod, who was off fishing in Scotland during the crucial experiments, did.) Or penicillin. Anne Miller, the first patient to be saved by the antibiotic, died on 27 May this year at the age of 90. Her hospital chart from 1942, showing the dramatic break in ...”

“... as they are, can’t help not coming up to. The second or critical section is extremely strong: John Gross on the Oxford Book, George Hartley on the early publishing, Clive James on the jazz criticism as well as the poems, Alan Brownjohn on the novels, Christopher Ricks on Larkin’s poetic style and structure, Seamus Heaney on his idealism, and others. But ...”

“... that will take care of everything we do, including not only detecting explosives but athlete’s foot as well.’ Every cracker-barrel sage and soapbox booster turned up for the party. One of them was Paul Ekman. He’s a psychologist, professor emeritus at the University of California and founder of the Emotional Intelligence Academy. In 2009, Time magazine ...”

“... and most of the characters wear fedoras, as if they’ve wandered in from a William Wyler or John Huston film. The sets, too, ‘bear witness to my passion for the American cinema’, Melville said. The phone booth in the métro is an American one; the bar resembles a coffee shop in Manhattan; the police interrogation room, with its Venetian blinds, is ...”

“... their equivalent in the 2005 reissue of Our Island Story by the right-wing think-tank Civitas. John Clare, the education editor of the Daily Telegraph, appealed to his readers for donations to support this project. ‘They responded by sending in an astonishing £25,000.’ There were messages of endorsement from Lady Antonia Fraser and the feisty ...”

“... be grim. Cape Grim, aptly named in 1798 by its British discoverer, Matthew Flinders RN, is a 3o0-foot sandstone spike projecting into the Southern Ocean on the wind-whipped western coast of Tasmania. Here nine weather scientists reporting to the IPCC work shifts in a huddle of prefabs, rotating in from Smithton, the nearest small settlement, sixty miles away ...”

“... store. On midsummer’s night in 1955 a tall, broad-shouldered farmer 17 years her senior, John Warren, took her to the stock car racing, and a year later, when Wendy was 21, they got married. John Warren rented 175 acres from the local squire in Dunton Bassett, a village in the south-west of the county. He’d been ...”

“... as criminal defendants Mr Crossman’s literary executors – among them his widow and Mr Michael Foot – and the editor of the Sunday Times. An order restraining publication could be issued with so much less inconvenience: by a judge alone, without a jury, and without the machinery of the criminal law. The Lord Chief Justice decided not to stop publication ...”

“... Mr Gradgrind: but the novel is best armed to do battle with him, in that it appears to have one foot in his camp because of the mass of particulars, resembling his ‘Facts’, that it mobilises for its own purposes. But it is a strange conflict, with long truces, and often looks like a mere family quarrel. I mean that the novelist’s effort – any ...”

“... pinned above my desk (I’ve never had a pinboard). I did, for a long time, have an index card a foot or two from where I write, bearing this consoling line from Ford Madox Ford: ‘It is an easy job to say that an elephant, however good, is not a good warthog; for most criticism comes to that.’PublishersFlaubert had a lordly view of the writer-publisher ...”