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“... from the flaming tuvva pans in their poky kitchens; buttery diets later to send them to premature graves would form tyres round their middle-aged waists; they’d not be able to sleep at night because of the back trouble they had developed from stooping over Singer sewing machines both at work and at home. As a reward for these sacrifices they would be ...”

“... them: ‘The closer you are to Caesar, the greater the fear.’ And near the end, passing by the graves of soldiers, Welsh gainsays in voiceover his professed cynicism and egoism: ‘If I never meet you in this life, let me feel the lack. A glance from your eyes, and my life will be yours.’ When the men of C Company arrive in Guadalcanal, the camera ...”

“... violently. I’m told she makes a speciality of stealing brides on the eve of their weddings.’ Peter Owen, who published many of Bowles’s books, wrote: Jane’s maid, Sherifa (sic) placed a nasty ‘magic’ mess (congealed blood, hair etc) under a potted plant, hoping it would influence Jane to give her money. When Jane was in the Málaga ...”

“... Trinity!10 January. In George Lyttelton’s Commonplace Book it’s recorded that Yeats told Peter Warlock that after being invited to hear ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’ (a solitary man’s expression of longing for still greater solitude) sung by a thousand Boy Scouts he set up a rigid censorship to prevent anything like that ever happening ...”

“... tenants. The Gregory clause was ‘a charter for land clearance and consolidation’, according to Peter Gray. ‘The substantial rise in evictions after 1847 was attributed largely to its introduction,’ according to Christine Kinealy. For the tenants whose potato crop had failed and whose families were starving, the Gregory clause was a nightmare. As a ...”

“... we put on our Crucible expressions before setting off to the graveyard to take down the celebrity graves and break them up for landfill. Of course. Graffiti the plaques and take down the statues, because the joy of execration must match the original sin, when we made heroes out of these damaged and damaging ‘entertainers’. We suddenly wish them to have ...”

“... stalemate filled with rumours, conspiracy theories: drugs, communists, the IRA, the Angry Brigade, Peter Hain. ‘The demons proliferate … The enemy is lurking everywhere. He – or increasingly she – is behind everything … Nevertheless, in its varying and protean forms, official society – the state, the political leadership, the opinion leaders, the ...”

“... who could, nevertheless, sing like angels. What of them? I never met or saw Britten, though he and Peter Pears came disastrously to Beyond the Fringe sometime in 1961. Included in the programme was a parody of Britten written by Dudley Moore, in which he sang and accompanied himself in ‘Little Miss Muffet’ done in a Pears and Britten-like way. I’m not ...”

“... coming out of Gaza – those visions from hell of corpses twisted together and buried in mass graves, the smaller corpses held by grieving parents, or laid on the ground in neat rows – have been quietly going mad over the last few months. Every day is poisoned by the awareness that while we go about our lives hundreds of ordinary people like ourselves ...”

“... a complicated bastard, which is why he needed so many alter egos (Nathan Zuckerman, David Kepesh, Peter Tarnopol) to thrash himself out.Any efforts at fine-shading Roth’s behaviour with women into a three-dimensional portrait runs into the problem of his two marriages. If any man had been shaped by nature and disposition to be a permanent bachelor, a ...”

“... a more complex state of enchantment with the theatre. Early in The Tragic Muse, the young diplomat Peter Sherringham, not yet in love with the actress Miriam Rooth, notices that ‘the plastic quality of her person was the only definite sign of a vocation.’ Later, he sees that ‘she was always acting, that her existence was a series of parts assumed for the ...”

“... February 1933, after staying over New Year with Hale in California, he made straight for their graves in Bellefontaine Cemetery: ‘Certainly the town was full of sadness for me; not so much on account of my mother as on account of my father; it was his city not hers; he was born there and worked for it and died there; and also I shall be haunted by my ...”