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“... as opposed to church bells, the cries of children playing outside, or the purring of a large, fat black and white cat? One sound is as likely and evocative as another, if you must import sound at all into a work which – unlike Picasso’s Guernica, or Edvard Munch’s The Scream – offers no tangible encouragement to the viewer to supply it. But at least ...”

“... belief that Germany was going to lose. So why did Germans not rise up and force the regime to sue for peace? Towards the end of the First World War, recognition that the war was lost led senior generals to the negotiating table. Not so in 1944-45. Why not? Most wars between states in the modern age, according to Ian Kershaw, end with an agreed peace as ...”

“... female flesh can be difficult to look at, but these were monochrome portrait heads, etched in hard black line. Did I find them cruel? I’m not sure. I certainly thought they were ugly. Decades later, after I had learned a bit about the process of etching, I became preoccupied by these strange, twisted, touching works, made in the last thirty years of ...”

“... had longish hair and wore an outfit that spoke of bohemian credentials: light-coloured trousers, a black frock coat, brightly coloured waistcoats with a white silk cravat held with an amethyst pin and always carrying lavender gloves.’ ‘It is at the Grosvenor Gallery,’ Wilde wrote in 1879, ‘that we are enabled to see the highest development of the ...”

“... England’.22 January. Watching Footballers’ Wives I see among the production credits the name Sue de Beauvoir.I do so hope she’s a relation.1 February, Yorkshire. Last time we visited Kirkby Stephen we were in Mrs H.’s shop when a clock chimed. I’ve never wanted a clock and this one was pretty dull, made in the 1950s probably and very plain. But the ...”

“... of racist attacks; or they have suffered accidents while in transit or at work, mostly in the black economy. In Driven to Desperate Measures, Harmit Athwal has gathered information from press reports and from interviews with asylum seekers and refugees, NGOs, charities and social workers. Her research makes clear that Britain, far from being somewhere to ...”

“... exotic in the New Yorker’s ascetic halls. She sported a rose in her left lapel, and carried a black and white skunk bag she was ‘inhumanly fond of’. No woman, she said, should wear a bra that cost less than $50 at Saks. Maeve Brennan photographed by Karl Bissinger in 1948 There are plenty of photographs of Brennan, but the one I remember is Karl ...”

“... twenty years, according to the Public Lending Right statistics, the nation’s favourite reading. Sue Townsend said of Diana that she was ‘a fatal non-reader’. She didn’t know the end of her own story. She enjoyed only the romances of Barbara Cartland. I’m far too snobbish to have read one, but I assume they are stories in which a wedding takes place ...”

“... his tarnished history seems more winsome than the eternally recommenced affairs of the J.R. and Sue Ellen of the West Riding). J.I.M. Stewart’s An Open Prison is splendidly paced, and ends absolutely without remainder. This is not dry-stonewalling, but the most skilled dressing of an elaborate façade, which leaves no sign of any nook or cranny, let alone ...”

“... of professional etiquette to readers of the diary, whereupon Tomalin had no alternative but to sue. To Waugh’s disappointment, Ingrams was minded to accept an out of court settlement. Waugh made vigorous attempts to inflame the situation, giving it ‘a good wiggle’ with a number of articles in the Spectator which he hoped would lead to a charge of ...”

“... the right-wing mobs carry weapons and beat people up, that’s a whole different category. A young black man from the bar, overhearing us, stepped up and joined forces with Robert: ‘The leftist mob, they’re bad!’It was a peculiar evening, and I suspect the weirdness of it could be matched anywhere in the US today. Why is it so easy to talk to people like ...”

“... wings – Snowflakes knock spots off Philibert de L’Orme Woodcut adoring kings with narrow eye Black-bottomed whitewear out of nowhere fast You see the azure through the muscatel The white opacities we hear as thunder The fact that each is an iambic pentameter disturbs their individual impact by turning them, in this listing, into a sort of joke stanza ...”

“... this poetry with aspiration and strips it of pretension. Sooner or later, its only recourse is to sue for clemency. Not long after he got back to Paris, Villon was in jail again on a robbery charge. The theology faculty objected to his release, which was made conditional on repayment of his share of the Christmas takings six years earlier. Within a few days ...”

“... rivals in the resistance, prompting the brother of a boy who had been killed in the attack to sue Bentivegna.There is another layer of meaning to the via Rasella episode. The attack was timed to coincide with the 25th anniversary of the birth of fascism: Mussolini’s rally in Milan on 23 March 1919. This was Italian business: even the troops targeted ...”

“... voice echoing behind us. In addition, my mother had one of her screaming fits and threatened to sue Doris for alienation of affection (hilarity ensued) if she tried to adopt me. So that was quietly dropped. I sometimes said ‘adoptive mother’ anyway, as an easy though inexact solution. It wasn’t only for form’s sake that it mattered how I referred to ...”