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“... my cut-glass maternal grandmother as the ‘Fast World War’), a very messy affair which had made Harry Clack’s lungs turn green. Harry worked in the potting sheds of my mother’s ancestral home and hacked up an eternal spew of mustard-gas phlegm. This got him out of going to the second war, which was a replay of the ...”

“... the richly three-dimensional charm of Farrell’s earlier heroes: the Collector, the Magistrate, Harry and Fleury, and the Major in Troubles who presides distractedly over the numerous Anglo-Irish family and guests at the Majestic Hotel.Farrell’s three structures are all based on siege situations, which gave him the right setting, tempo and psychological ...”

“... Valera received a telegram from Chief Rabbi Herzog of Palestine: ‘REVERED FRIEND PRAY LEAVE NO STONE UNTURNED TO SAVE TORMENTED REMNANT OF ISRAEL DOOMED ALAS TO UTTER ANNIHILATION IN NAZI EUROPE GREETINGS ZIONS BLESSINGS.’ Herzog followed this in January 1943 with a long telegram which referred to ‘five million threatened with extermination’. De ...”

“... the grass outside the south door had been replaced or supplemented by a patio not even in York stone but in some fake composition. Inside, draped in front of the altar was a gaudy banner advertising the Richard III Society. This I rolled up and had I had the means would have destroyed. I wrote to the CCT, who generally do a decent job, but was told the ...”

“... with his brother Frank, describing Galway as a grand little magic grey town full of sensitive stone and bridges and water. We … spent a day walking on Achill right out over the Atlantic … Altogether it was an unforgettable trip and much too short, through bog and mountain scenery that was somehow far more innocent and easy and obvious than the ...”

“... up by their father to believe that their Uncle Henry in England was slightly silly, but now, as Harry James, William’s son, read these letters he was deeply impressed at their tone and their gravity. He wrote to his sister Peggy: It will, I rather think, make Uncle Henry count very much more than he did already. For it’s full of literature as well as ...”

“... notorious as the place to get rich quickly, if you could do so before succumbing to the climate. Harry Verelst thought that £30,000 would be ‘sufficient to set down with myself and also to serve my friends’, but George Vansittart advised his nephew to get £60,000. The impeachment in 1787 of the former governor-general, Warren Hastings, was intended to ...”

“... legacy, after all. What Happens in Terry Stays in Terry. Emblazoned on the slip of paper was a Harry-Potterish list of aristocratic-sounding titles that Mavis seems to have invented for the three of us (me, my sister and herself) for reasons unknown. Honorifics one might call them, or perhaps, horrorifics. Now I should explain that in my mother’s eyes ...”

“... Worn-out, jet-lagged, tied to itineraries, he lost touch with the elemental basics of Glanmore (‘stone, slate … cold water, open hearths’) and felt reduced to ‘the “mask” of S.H.’, a ‘mascot’. The public celebration of his seventieth birthday, he told one of his most trusted correspondents, the historian Eamon Duffy, left him ‘feeling that ...”

“... to I Tatti in the post-war period included such marginal representatives of the Civilised Life as Harry S. Truman, Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy (whose presence was, BB felt, ‘life-enhancing’), and, most improbable of all, Ernest Hemingway. Meryle Secrest discloses that Hemingway was desperate in his suit for Berenson’s favours, and would have prostrated ...”

“... leaders given summary justice. It was the arrival at the White House of Roosevelt’s successor, Harry Truman, that put all such plans on hold. Truman was determined that there should be a real, not a pre-determined, trial, one containing that element of risk which is indispensable if the fairness of criminal proceedings is to be established. The precedent ...”

“... how to run a college.’ By late April he was installed in Venice, ‘by the soap-smooth stone posts where San Vio/meets with il Canal Grande’ (Canto LXXVI). From there he writes back to his ‘Benign & Reverend Parent’, in answer to an inquiry into the state of his finances: ‘I am by no means sure it would not be pleasanter to starve the body ...”

“... fluffysdoggingqueen was an idiot with badly dyed roots, terrible halitosis and at least three stone overweight. In the world of lay-bys and car parks she was a celebrity, a star. He wouldn’t cross the road to see her buggered by an Irish builder on the bonnet of a BMW one more time. Meanwhile a gay man like Sam, who runs a cheese shop in the town, can ...”

“... Palestinian intifada: ‘The natives: for many years … they asked for bread, and we gave them a stone. Now they have found a use for these stones; we are getting them back – thrown. Thrown at trains, at police, at white men’s cars.’ Note the ‘we’. By her own analysis, Gordimer has always been a legitimate target. Paul Bannerman, the central ...”

“... Alliance says that her motto is ‘cut, kill, dig and drill’ and that she lives ‘in the Stone Age of wildlife management, and is very opposed to utilising accepted science’. For many voters, that’s ample reason to see her as a folk hero. She has nicely positioned herself for national consumption as the enemy of the effete and over-sophisticated ...”