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“... sequence of apes infesting San Francisco and the Golden Gate Bridge on their way to take over the redwood forest, but it lingers for a very long time on the dilemma that is the precise theme of Project Nim. Nim Chimpsky was a chimpanzee brought up from birth in a human family, playing with the children and the dog, being breastfed by the mother, and ...”

“... Like all the best whodunnits, it is a slow burner. A group of clever young men – Oliver Letwin, John Redwood, William Waldegrave, among others – gather in various restaurants and country house hotels to bat around ideas for reforming the financing of local governance, encouraged and provoked by their mentor, Lord Rothschild. They were much clearer ...”

“... century, with being one of the first writers to praise the loveliness of trees. This won’t do. John Evelyn, a century before, had spoken of beeches making ‘spreading trees and noble shades with their well-furnish’d and glistering leaves’, and also of Xerxes’ admiration of the plane: ‘that so beautiful and precious tree’. Timothy Pont, at the ...”

“... didn’t answer my other questions didn’t make me doubt for one minute he could read my mind. John Gavin who played Sam in Psycho was Reagan’s ambassador to Mexico. Psycho was the first Hollywood film to show a toilet flush. Encopresis is another mental illness I suffered from. It involves farting. The initials of the history student, now a ...”

“... we will eventually learn is Mendocino, a tiny town in northern California surrounded by cliffs and redwood forests. We realise on the very first page that we are in the Weathered Americana school of fiction: an old house, climbing roses and peeling paint; bullet-riddled sheet metal and spent shell casings; a pickup truck, flannel, a pair of Levi’s. (The word ...”

“... what took place at Beijing airport on Monday, 21 February 1972. It’s also the opening scene of John Adams’s opera Nixon in China, premiered in Houston in 1987, and staged again at the London Coliseum over a few evenings last summer. An actual occurrence then, but also, as Adams and his librettist Alice Coleman understood, a brightly lit performance with ...”

“... Smith Institute for the Criminally Insane, banging the same drum in the Independent. Not long ago John Bird and John Fortune did a sketch about the privatisation of air. These days it scarcely seems unthinkable. 28 February. There have been football riots in Bruges, where Chelsea have been playing, with, responsible for ...”

“... editor had taken a blue pencil to Whitman’s typically over-expansive line in the ‘Song of the Redwood Tree’, ‘A chorus of dryads, fading, departing, or hamadryads departing’, even if it seems unlikely that Eliot drowned Uncle Walt full fathom five in Phlebas the Phoenician, or tilled his blood into his rose garden. Bloom’s American canon does not ...”