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“... so that the story can be clearly told to another,’ he tells the RA’s artistic director, Tim Marlow, in the catalogue. But the last substantial work at the RA surely retains a good deal of ‘primitive feeling’ precisely in its brooding material and geometrical presence. S.A.C.R.E.D. (2013) is an installation of six rectangular boxes made of ...”

“... to London, and the book was about to go into the final stages of production, when it occurred to Tim O’Keeffe to ask me if I had obtained permission to use the words of the Gershwin song in my title. I had not. I wrote immediately to the Gershwin Publishing Corporation in New York, requesting permission. It was refused. I pleaded with them to change their ...”

“... more of a mystery than the mystery itself. The only intelligence that’s occasionally allowed to cross his face is a mocking irony. It’s this quality that will be fatal to the murderer, who is drawn into a battle of wills he can only lose. Like Simenon himself in Letter to My Mother, Maigret proceeds by enforced proximity. He goes to the scene of the ...”

“... some credit where we dwell’ and ‘We are London Gentle-women borne.’ Both Eleanor Hubbard and Tim Reinke-Williams emphasise that ‘sexual behaviour was not the only activity which determined female identity and reputation.’ They use court records to examine the lives of 17th-century London women who married and raised children but also worked and ...”

“... was unexpected even to an ill-prepared Conservative Central Office, provides the focal point of Tim Shipman’s Fall Out. The book is a fly-on-the-wall account compiled from off-the-record interviews with many of the dramatis personae in Theresa May’s topsy-turvy first year as prime minister. There is much here that leaves the reader uneasy – including ...”

“... signal that confused the consumer. If British meat was perfectly safe, and if BSE could not cross the species barrier, then why ban the offal? Once, while writing a hasty story-so-far about BSE as a background to some other twist in the saga, I suggested that the Government itself showed all the symptoms of mad cow disease: it staggered from one policy ...”

“... shorthand for moments of success, or more often failure. Pavese also shows a remarkable ability to cross-reference his own reflections back and forth across many years, suggesting that he was constantly reading and rereading his diary, seeking finer and finer definitions of the concepts that had become important to him: myth, destiny, ritual, man’s ...”

“... Graphics. So I have a little pile of pieces of paper with ‘ideas’ roughly drawn on them: a cross with a pirate flag, a ghost caught on barbed wire, an egg on a tightrope, a cage in prison. Next to me I have a tea trolley with paints and water on it. I draw the picture in pen and ink, colour it in: if it works, I frame it. I can do about three a day at ...”

“... slaps a wet cloth into her hand and tells her she’s an ‘eejit’.Even without the sign of the cross on her face, Cushla is marked. There’s her first name, from the Irish for ‘the pulse of my heart’; her way of speaking (Protestants, she learned as a child, say ‘aitch’ while Catholics say ‘haitch’); her familiarity with the Irish ...”

“... meets (all 1500 of them) and the places he visits with enthusiasm at once wide-eyed and critical. Tim Mackintosh-Smith has lived in Yemen since the early 1980s; his first book was Yemen: Travels in Dictionary Land (1997). A couple of years later, poking around in Sana’s Greater Yemen Bookshop, he came across Ibn Battutah’s memoir, and decided to follow in ...”

“... You​ can divide most sports into those that take place in the real world (road cycling, sailing, cross country running) and those that are played on the artificial space of a court or pitch. Some (golf, croquet) occupy an uncertain middle ground, which may be one of the reasons they are so tedious to watch. Others (football, rugby) started as the former and, as they were codified, became the latter ...”

“... after 380 seems likely: George Cawkwell, in the Lane Fox volume, argues persuasively for 370-367; Tim Rood, in his excellent introduction to Waterfield’s translation, also favours a date in the 360s. It’s probable, then, that Xenophon was aware of Isocrates’ criticisms. In response, he emphasises that not all the mercenaries followed Cyrus simply in ...”

“... he told me, it filled up that awful space to the south-west, giving him a feeling of security.’ Tim Robinson relates this, near the end of his double-work, Stones of Aran: pilgrimage and Labyrinth. ‘In reality Pangaea is broken,’ Robinson writes, ‘and all the mysterious bits and pieces circulating in the slow vortices of Panthalassa – Atlantis, the ...”

“... brothels were not the ‘antics’ or ‘frivolous gestures’ that Manning labels them, and as Tim Harris has shown, they did not die out at the Civil War. In another revealing sentence, Manning declares that a simple enclosure riot was ‘hardly more than a skimmington, and thus a fairly primitive form of social protest’. This surely indicates a serious ...”

“... book made a lot of people furious, but was hardly New Jersey’s Salman Rushdie. True, my one-week cross-country American book tour had been a mite intense. ‘We’re going to rip you to shreds,’ a woman doctor hissed at me in the corridor of a Baltimore television studio. ‘Bullets are too good for you!’ snarled a pony-tailed man in army fatigues at a ...”