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“... when confronted with the white-sheeted lynch mob: ‘the one nearest him had on a silvery basket-ball warm-up jacket with CELTICS written across the chest ... He was no more than four or five steps away ... powerfully built ... His jacket was open ... a white T-shirt ... tremendous chest muscles ... a square face ... wide jaws ... a wide mouth ... What was ...”

“... jerky bowling action (they suspect him of achieving his extraordinary bounce by chucking the ball rather than bowling it). Muralitharan didn’t disappoint either his supporters or his critics, but the Australians had the last laugh. Ponting’s team won 3-0, despite the fact that they conceded a first innings lead in each game, and despite ...”

“... has analogies with another new theatrical fashion: the ‘humours comedy’ of the mid 1590s – George Chapman’s An Humorous Days Mirth (1597) and Jonson’s Every Man in His Humour (1598) are well-known examples – and the slicker, smuttier ‘city comedies’ of Thomas Middleton, Thomas Dekker, John Marston et al, which follow slightly later. Like the ...”

“... West in She Done Him Wrong and I’m No Angel. Best of all – albeit in a big failure – he met George Cukor and Katharine Hepburn on a film, Sylvia Scarlett, that was too daring for its time, in which he played Jimmy Monkley, a Cockney con artist, and felt able to be himself.He needed this, for his life was in crisis. In late 1933, at his father’s ...”

“... It opens with an image of a garden in St Petersburg, where the tsar’s children are tossing a ball back and forth: ‘It fell among the flowerbeds./Or fled to the north gate.//A daylight moon hung up/In the Western sky, bald white.’ The trajectory of the lost toy is symbolic of the march of history, moving ‘eastward among the stars/Toward February and ...”

“... this Edenic oasis is no exception. (An incautious nine-iron shot, for instance, may loft one’s ball into the abutting refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila; a mishap which the well-liked professional, Mr ‘Sami’ Ibrahim, counts as an extra stroke.) Other unwelcome reminders are not wanting. The honours boards tell their own distressing story. Recording as ...”

“... were thus outwitted. There is, however, another interpretation: that the judges hoofed the ball into their own net. What they were in effect saying was this: we’ll go along with what the publishers propose, we’re sure they can judge a novel just as well if not better than us. So let’s dutifully plough through these three bodice-rippers from ...”

“... obscure and improbable Helicons. This addiction would have astounded the good Dr Struve who, in George IV’s Brighton, operated his German Spa with a row of taps offering the ‘factitious’, or homemade, waters of Ems, Baden Baden, Pyrmont and the best Bohemian springs; an enterprise which saw him widely patronised and widely reviled. At least it was ...”

“... le monde des chimères.’ He spent almost a month in St Petersburg – where he attended a lavish ball given by the Tsar – and then travelled on to Moscow, Yaroslavl and Nizhny Novgorod before returning to St Petersburg in mid-September. Custine left Russia on 26 September with an intensely negative view of its regime, which, he said, had turned the people ...”

“... all ‘a dedicated group of happy-go-lucky enthusiasts, who ought not to be bossed about’? Sir George Mallaby, however thick the velvet of his gloves, was trained enough to want to keep things a bit tidy. Indeed Lees-Milne did feel that Mallaby was too ready to give way to government – ‘typical of the Civil Service mind, which is perfectionist’, as ...”

“... more than enough free-floating material to pad out tome after fresh tome on Graham Greene, or George Orwell, or P.G. Wodehouse, or Evelyn Waugh, or Bernard Shaw, or Cyril Connolly? Must we prepare our shelves for yet another cache of letters, stumbled across like Dead Sea scrolls, every decade? If so, will they, too, rank high with biographers as ...”

“... invaded Kuwait. American foreign policy had gone into furious tilt and O’Malley was not playing ball. The thing to do is to concentrate, as O’Toole does, not on how the decision to issue export credit insurance fell apart, but on how it was made (by Albert Reynolds, against the advice of his civil servants); increased (by Reynolds at the behest of Larry ...”

“... social dominance. As jester or as sage, he was loldly above the fray and yet mysteriously on the ball. Another winning formula, and Lewis traces its drawing-room effects in ardent detail. The kind of people Connolly most wanted to impress, and did impress, were the kind of people who wrote lots of determinedly well-written letters. Lewis is skilful in his ...”

“... so utterly sincere’. But for a readership which had learned to revere Harriet Beecher Stowe and George Eliot, the effect was chilling. Stoddard’s power is more evident in her stories than the novels. Her pitiless strategies acquire an even sharper edge without the need to cope with the complexities of a sustained plot. First published in various New York ...”

“... be, for instance about the exaggerated account of Henry VIII’s consistency recently provided by George Bernard, and his keen eye ranges over a rich variety of sources, both visual and literary. There are more little slips in the text than there should be. My fear of confirming a reputation as a joyless pedant restrains me from rounding them up, with the ...”