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“... volume is dedicated to the memory of her father, and ‘My Father’ records her learning of his death (in New Zealand) while coincidentally visiting the Manchester of his childhood, passing en route signs to nowhere, to the names of some nothing streets beatified in my family history file. A sense of absences on the map translates, as much as for ...”

“... terrible and somewhat misleading word’. The word is terrible, presumably, because it conceals death in its very announcement of life: ‘those dying generations’, Yeats wrote, but then all generations die, that’s what they do. And it is misleading because it bundles together very different people at the behest of a clock or a calendar. But we do live ...”

“... Percy Thompson, a shipping clerk and old member of the Stepney Elocution Class, was stabbed to death in the street near his home in Ilford. His wife, Edith, was with him; her lover and former lodger, Frederick Bywaters, was the attacker. These circumstances were not disputed when the couple were charged with Thompson’s murder. But when they were found ...”

“... Fassbender as Jung and Viggo Mortensen as Freud speak with flawless English accents, as does Sarah Gadon as Emma, Jung’s all too perfect wife. Knightley speaks fluent American-Russian, and Vincent Cassel as the disreputable Otto Gross sounds as French as he always does, indeed repeats more or less word for word his role in Black Swan. However, the ...”

“... Macmillan’s fellow MP Bob Boothby and demanded a divorce, claiming that her youngest daughter, Sarah, was Boothby’s child. From being regarded as a jolly sort, keen on golf and a dab hand at opening fêtes, Dorothy suddenly revealed unsuspected Wagnerian depths of passion, saying to Boothby: ‘Why did you ever wake me? I never want to see any of my ...”

“... at Sinai; the elaboration of the law or teaching (torah means ‘teaching’); and finally the death of Moses as his people are on the verge of the promised land. Biblical style is famous for its stony reticence, for a mimesis that Erich Auerbach called ‘fraught with background’. This reticence is surely not as unique as Auerbach claimed – Herodotus ...”

“... seems to have been a belief that temptation, particularly sexual temptation, fades as nearness to death increases. Also, wisdom should have been acquired by the old, and should lead to virtue. St Bernard went further and held that since the old should have arrived at wisdom and virtue, a young man, by achieving these, could be old in the ‘true’ sense of ...”

“... and what ought to have been done with it. Then they have to face her preoccupation not only with death but with the grave, and the sensation of lying, remembered or forgotten, under the turf. There was, too, a sardonic Christina, whose comment on art and life was this: The mangled frog abides incog, The uninteresting actual frog: The hypothetic frog alone ...”

“... weeping over, and partly because those who fall from a lofty height make a greater splash. The death of a princess has complex consequences in society as a whole; the death of a chauffeur does not. In a democratic age, by contrast, the ranks of potential tragic protagonists have swollen immeasurably. Anybody plucked from ...”

“... the bolt hole Turner the famous painter had in the character of Turner, common-law husband of Sarah Danby and father of two daughters by her, or, later, Turner, alias Booth (sometimes Admiral Booth), common-law husband of Mrs Booth in Chelsea. His domestic relations with these women are undocumented. Negligible provision was made for them in his various ...”

“... which is Royal Ballet-speak for asked to leave. ‘At assessment time everyone’s so stressed,’ Sarah, a former student there told me. ‘Everyone stops eating.’ (This isn’t just nerves. As the school’s guidance on eating disorders puts it, ballet dancers are ‘aesthetic athletes’ whose appearance ‘is a part of their performance’.) In any ...”

“... to the left of the headword. Murray’s successors William Craigie and Charles Onions tussled over whether to maintain this practice. Proofs of the Supplement dated 11 September 1929 retain Murray’s so-called tramlines; in the next proofs, dated 2 July 1930, they are gone. Between these dates, Onions joined the BBC Advisory Committee on Spoken English, where he became acutely aware of the prejudices that led some people to stigmatise new or imported terms; tramlines, he felt, didn’t help ...”

“... to Moses [son of Maimon] there was none like Moses’ began to circulate shortly after his death. And then there is his Arabic name: Musa ibn Maymun ibn’Abdallah al-Qurtubi al-Andalusi al-Isra’ili (Moses son of Maimon son of Abdallah the Cordoban the Andalusian the Israelite), a name that announced he was a Jew born in and exiled from Muslim ...”

“... point of entering the lists she does not yet appear to be regarded as a mistake of the calibre of Sarah Ferguson and Diana Spencer.The latter prompts Tina Brown to remark: ‘What a pity that the queen, so gifted at reading the bloodlines of horses, misread so profoundly the Spencers’ suitability to join with royal stock. Yes, in terms of pedigree, they ...”

“... on how best to irritate people, An Essay on the Art of Ingeniously Tormenting (1753). After her death in 1755 it was considered a shame that she hadn’t tried writing something less rebarbative. Her younger brother Arthur ‘often lamented’, the 1804 editor of the Essay recalled, ‘that a sister possessing such amiable manners, and such ...”