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“... medical transition, for example, lasted two years, involving 25 general anaesthetics, a ten-stone weight gain, thromboses, more than one major haemorrhage, fistula and infections. She barely survived, though none of this has stopped her from going on to lead one of the most effective campaigning lives as a transsexual woman. In 1931, Lili Elbe died ...”

“... Frederick the Great, Beyond Soap and Water, as his Nietzschean son was beyond Good and Evil.’ Harry Furniss wrote that ‘Lady Wilde, had she been cleaned up and plainly and rationally dressed, would have made a remarkably fine model of the Grand Dame, but with all her paint and tinsel and tawdry tragedy-queen get-up she was a walking burlesque of ...”

“... seducing upper-class women; and he was an unrivalled showman on the podium. His nickname, ‘Flash Harry’, was a very different soubriquet from Henry Wood’s ‘Old Timber’: a double-edged acknowledgment, not only of his celebrity, but also of what his critics regarded as his limitations. It took Sargent seven years to assert his dominance over the ...”

“... French penal colony for the similarly ailing Jean Genet: ‘I envisaged bringing him its earth and stone.’ As with Bowles, at the time of this jaunt Genet was dying, refusing pain medication in order to finish Un Captif amoureux. She says that in his early work Genet painted earthly hell-holes as his own form of secular redemption, and that when they ...”

“... close to a recitation of a catechism, simply asking, for example, ‘how it can be that a stone, a plant, a star, can take on the burden of being.’ But where all his powers were concentrated, Agee could build to more sustained recognitions; as in the intense rendering of the plain faces of a man and a woman: The young man’s eyes had the opal ...”

“... Caine is singled out for praise as ‘dismissive of establishments wherever he found them’ – Harry Palmer ‘came to epitomise the decline of deference’. (Peter Hitchens, in contrast, uses the framework of national identity in The Abolition of Britain, published in 1999, to issue a diatribe against the ‘social revolution’ – the disappearance of ...”

“... of Wren, ‘the greatest English architect’, now taken for granted, was fledged. The architect Harry Goodhart-Rendel was right: ‘Practically all Englishmen and practically no foreigners’ believe that Wren was a great architect. As if to prove it, the English dotards and their epigones would, amazingly, still be at it, all red brick and ...”

“... Union flag mask, Park View recently hosted a visit from the Royal College of Defence Studies and a Harry Potter Trivia Evening; it had a Christmas card competition, and one girl was picked to meet Prince William. The school leadership is new, the trust that oversees the running of the school has a new name and the school itself will shortly get a new name ...”

“... facts’ are paramilitary crimes, from armed robberies to punishment beatings. Harry McCartan, a serial joy-rider whose ankles the IRA had smashed with hammers 18 months before, was found crucified and semi-conscious on 2 November 2002. He was taken to hospital with his hands still impaled on the fence he had been nailed to. The beating he ...”

“... A scientific law will accurately predict an outcome, given certain initial conditions: where a stone will land if launched with a certain force at a certain angle; the colour of your unborn child’s eyes. But there is no other Earth on which to run experiments. So climate scientists build models using known physical laws, then test and improve them with ...”

“... And certainly, the un-Tolkien-like tweeness of J.K. Rowling’s coinages doesn’t help with Harry Potter.3 But both Ursula le Guin (in her great Earthsea trilogy, 1968-73) and Philip Pullman (in his trilogy, His Dark Materials, 1995-2000) developed evocative and consistent naming systems for their imagined worlds without going on and on about it. Of ...”

“... those years, all those boys, they pass through your hands and into the blue. And never come back, Harry; they never come back … Give the boys the will to achieve. I’ve always liked that better than the will to win, for there can be achievement even in defeat. Make them feel the, yes, I think the word is good, the sacredness of achievement, in the form of ...”

“... ministers, came and went, and in Sir Kevin’s case the Queen felt she might simply be a stepping-stone to those corporate heights for which he was undoubtedly headed. He was a graduate of the Harvard Business School and one of his publicly stated aims (‘setting out our stall,’ as he put it) was to make the monarchy more accessible. The opening of ...”

“... saying I needed to have evidence.He wanted me to have specifics, ‘actuals’, but the trail went stone cold after he sent me a long email with links to articles in a number of newspapers and links to publicly available council documents, all of which showed the councillors he named behaving like Tories, and Feilding-Mellen behaving like a man who made ...”