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“... acid at me. My chin was sore. The skin was grated off the palms of my hands. I started to run. A man and two women, all middle-aged, him in a light brown suede jacket, came running towards me. The women hollered: ‘Oh my God!’ The man bellowed: ‘Are you OK? Are you OK?’ ‘Yeah, yeah – I’m fine! Fine!’ I ...”

“... the remnants of public anthems? The water is grey and blue, wide as an inlet of the sea. – A ray of white light, falling from high in the sky, obliterates this sham scene. If walking helped Rimbaud get a thought or a sequence into shape, it was not his only means of production. In 1873, during two stints at the family farm in the Ardennes – one before ...”

“... military service involved only a few weeks of training, but he remained technically an enlisted man, and could have been called up between 1812 and 1816. He worked irregularly in these years with fencing and hedging gangs engaged in enclosure. The Clares’ cottage had been divided, and they now had only two rooms. Clare’s father wasn’t well, and from ...”

“... told Peter Warlock that after being invited to hear ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’ (a solitary man’s expression of longing for still greater solitude) sung by a thousand Boy Scouts he set up a rigid censorship to prevent anything like that ever happening again. This is presumably the origin of Larkin’s remark that before he died he fully expected to ...”

“... There’s​ an old joke. ‘A man was choking to death in a restaurant and Barbra Streisand was sitting at the next table. She rushed over and did the Heimlich manoeuvre and saved his life. Next day the headline read: Barbra Streisand Takes the Food Right Out of a Person’s Mouth.’ Streisand repeats the joke in her autobiography, My Name Is Barbra, to explain why she felt a ‘certain kinship’ with Bill Clinton during his presidency ...”

“... admission often specified some weapon-related topic involving uranium fission (more recently ‘X-ray lasers’, a subject of interest in relation to advanced thermonuclear weapons, has been popular), but they were firmly guided into some project that was considered harmless, such as the preparation of ion sources for atomic or nuclear experiments. These ...”

“... The only writer I know of who has done justice to the experience is a science fiction writer, Ray Bradbury. He has a 1953 story, ‘The Playground’, where a father makes a pact with the powers of evil in order to substitute for his son in the battle. He’s sucked back into memory and finds himself miniaturised and skinless all over again: there were ...”

“... While Gillespie with his two epistemes of positivism and creationism had to relegate Owen to a no man’s land of ‘nescience’, where the quest for a mechanism of speciation was allegedly abandoned, Desmond provides the perfect corrective. Owen did in fact toy with a mechanism which took for its analogy the complex life-cycle of parasitic flukes: ‘He ...”

“... keener than H.D., who wrote to a friend that Bryher loved her ‘so madly it is terrible. No man ever cared for me like that.’ She complained that Bryher had a brain where her heart should be and was ‘cold and imperious’: ‘Hard face, child face, how can you be so hard?’ But after H.D. became pregnant by Gray and both men deserted her, her ...”

“... hired by Gupta businesses.After Zuma’s downfall in 2018, a commission of inquiry led by Justice Ray Zondo found that the Guptas, aided by the president, had cajoled, threatened and bribed civil servants and politicians to help their businesses. The report describes how the ‘Zuptas’ replaced the heads of government organisations and diverted ...”

“... Before basic training he qualified to be a Special Forces sergeant through a programme called 18 X-Ray, which was designed to ‘augment the ranks of the small flexible units that were doing the hardest fighting in America’s increasingly shadowy and disparate wars’. One senses that the gamer in Snowden got the better of him here. He had hardly been a ...”

“... the latter is busy with her left-wing patter – , and, contradicting her, the vicar, a timid man (large Adam’s apple), with a brown-eyed, canine squint, chokes upon a nervous cough. 3 Tea stronger than a Munich beer. In the room the air is hazy. In the hearth a flamelet lazy gleams, like a butterfly on boulders. I’ve overstayed – it’s time to ...”

“... about the war, were adaptations of novels. In the first scene of Le Silence de la mer (1949), a man leaves a suitcase on the street; another man opens it to find, underneath some pressed shirts, the 1942 novel of the Resistance by Vercors on which the film is based. The pages of the novel reveal the credits: a device, as ...”

“... novel. My first was a copy of Juneteenth, which I insisted on buying instead of Invisible Man. Invisible Man was finished. The guy was invisible. Next. But Juneteenth held the secret, maybe. It was unbound. It bulged in the hand like a sheaf of papers, and Ellison was still alive in it, the process was ...”

“... wartime internship in a psychiatric hospital, was translated in 1988. But his earliest SF novels, Man from Mars and The Astronauts, weren’t. Lem dismissed them as mutilated by a subservience to Soviet ideology. So his career in English begins with two novels published in Poland in 1959. His turn to science fiction was in the spirit of other Iron Curtain ...”