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“... the New Jersey Turnpike is too busy altogether. This use of altogether, I’m reminded by Terence Patrick Dolan in A Dictionary of Hiberno-English, means ‘wholly, completely’ and may be compared to the Irish phrase ar fad, particularly in its positioning at the end of a sentence.* There’s a world of difference between the phrase ‘you’re altogether ...”

“... a pronounced theological emphasis, there is no mention here of Dostoevsky, Rilke, Kafka, Bataille, Patrick White, Beckett, Nabokov, Bellow, Spark, Marilynne Robinson, Saramago or Coetzee (whose novel Diary of a Bad Year has several paragraphs on the afterlife). Nabokov’s work is shot through with a persistent mysticism; in Pnin, the author imagines the ...”

“... circle of acquaintance, including with the Australian painter Roy de Maistre. In his memoir, Patrick White remembers de Maistre as ‘a snob’ who ‘enjoyed a princess’:In Eccleston Street, in the de Maistre studio-salon, I met other more or less important people, among them Henry Moore, Graham Sutherland, Francis Bacon, as well as Douglas ...”

“... for lieutenant when he was about thirty, and to reach Nelson’s own rank of vice-admiral of the white in 1814. Yet even before 1814 midshipmen were undergoing an unofficial examination to ‘pass for gentlemen’ as well as the official ‘passing for lieutenant’: and by 1914 the gap between quarterdeck and lower deck was wide indeed. Nor does Keegan deal ...”

“... of Dunkirk, for example – but it uncritically endorses others. A black US serviceman makes a white English factory-worker pregnant, much to the mutual satisfaction of both parties. A single boy sailor on a raft heroically survives to tell the tale of his sinking ship. Rather oddly, an analytical view of Britain’s role in the war is provided by the ...”

“... Maud Cunard disinherited her (her father had died in 1925), and Nancy’s pamphlet Black Man and White Ladyship (1931) recounts not just her mother’s bigotry but the prurient, tittering racism of a whole stratum of British society. Crowder and Cunard went to Harlem together in 1931 and 1932, and Nancy met some of the leading black writers and thinkers of ...”

“... ended with ‘To be continued’. The second with ‘To be concluded’. But the third book of Patrick Leigh Fermor’s famous walk from the Hook of Holland to ‘Constantinople’ was never completed. He died two years ago, rewriting and correcting and adding and tweaking almost to the end. The manuscript, some versions of it handwritten, some typed ...”

“... steps to articulate the greenery (which, because his photographs, like Smith’s, are in black and white, is not green at all). While water and sculpture are picked up by painters and photographers, they are not needed urgently in a real garden. The experience of walking along a big herbaceous border, taking in the complicated plant relationships one by ...”

“... Patrick Eagar​ made his career taking photographs of cricketers, though when he started out in London more than fifty years ago his subjects were mainly party people. In 1966, he took a picture with his Leica of someone he’d never heard of: Oskar Schindler. ‘It is not an exciting shot,’ he once said. ‘But it exists ...”

“... of ghosted East End gangster memoirs: bother with the law, church, boxing club, billet in the White Tower, Colchester, battalion champion, guardhouse, on the trot. It is at this point that John Healy’s autobiography diverts spectacularly from the route chosen by those premature Thatcherites, the Brothers Kray. They plunged into the abyss from an ...”

“... whereas Cavan and even Monaghan have a less decided orientation. I cannot, for example, think of Patrick Kavanagh as a Northern writer, any more than I would wish to allocate Peadar O’Donnell to the South.’ Donegal is part of the North, yes, but it’s also the place many Northerners go to escape from ‘Norn Ireland’, as we sometimes call ...”

“... tribe, for that is what the Boers had become in their isolation: they had become Afrikaners, the white tribe of Africa, arrogant, xenophobic and “full of blood” as the Zulus say of tyrants. They had their own language, their own customs and traditions, and a myth to light their way, a mystic Christian mission on the Dark Continent. They spoke of ...”

“... in the evolution of domestic comfort’. From the moment of that 1925 pavilion, ‘only white austerity was virtuous. Decoration was bad for the soul; it had to be stripped away.’ The freakshow continues right up to the present. Rybczynski deplores the damage done by the ‘socialist post-war governments in England, Germany, Holland and the ...”

“... into his best-known poem,’ in which ‘The whale-back hill assumes its concrete city:/The white-flanked towers, the stillborn monuments;/The thousand golden offices, untenanted.’ Matthias had organised a North American reading tour for Fisher, which would take him to Buffalo, Toronto, Ottawa, and on ‘a road trip east from Buffalo heading for a ...”

“... to embody these feelings is an elderly, one-eyed woman, a singer of ballads, who resembles, in Patrick Creagh’s translation, an early version of Yeats’s Crazy Jane: Woman whose face is worn and green As pebbles in a mountain stream, Tears of love have cracked your skin! This woman rarely appears in Les Amours jaunes. She stands somewhere at the very ...”