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“... of the 20th century. They may be right. Norma Jeane Mortensen was born in June 1926 in the charity ward of Los Angeles General Hospital. Her mother Gladys Baker was now and again mad, leaving her daughter troubled but free to dream up an alternative life, and to develop her vital allure reading movie magazines. Norma Jeane had a keen sense of how to conquer ...”

“... on 22 October 4004 bc. Nor were ideas of ‘development’ new in themselves, and writers such as Robert Chambers, in his bestseller of the 1840s Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, could run together an eclectic mix of geology, natural history and philosophical speculation to propose some kind of ‘evolutionary’ story. After 1859, Darwin’s name ...”

“... a cataclysm: he fell in love. When Donne met her, Anne More was in her mid-teens, the niece and ward of his employer’s second wife, Elizabeth Wolley, and the daughter of Sir George More, a wealthy, ambitious and notably short-tempered man. There was no question of a courtship; Sir George had not sent his daughter to London to make a match with her ...”

“... off. It’s a good service, a model, with none of the speakers – his two sons, Richard Eyre and Robert Bathurst – outstaying their welcome and Ben vividly recalled.Bathurst is particularly good, reading a Betjeman poem about golf, following it up with a very funny (and almost better) poem in parody by Ben himself. Since I know him chiefly from ...”

“... to hide the clock from him, to allay his demented conviction that executioners would arrive in the ward to shoot him at exactly six o’clock. Nadezhda’s awareness was equally unmitigated, but was sustained in the daylight of a sane consciousness, borne like a hot brand in her by now almost feral intelligence. Suddenly she became a guerrilla of the ...”

“... well aware of Wharton’s elegy, but they are not interested in the personage it describes. As the ward of Rochester’s mother, Wharton was brought up in the same house as the poet and, though she was twelve years younger, knew Rochester rather better than we or any other of the commentators on his life may be said to have done. In the months that followed ...”

“... by Maclise, for example, who would soon paint Othello and Desdemona, and especially by Charles Robert Leslie (who had supplied the frontispiece for a cheap edition of The Pickwick Papers in 1847). Leslie had on several occasions taken subjects from Cervantes (one example had found its way into the National Gallery). But the subjects of the paintings (like ...”

“... in Lebanon. The argument given in defence of what was done has been, from the start, that sending Robert McFarlane to Teheran was an attempt to exploit a ‘geopolitical opening’. Both versions of the same series of events have been criticised as an affront to the stated US policy of not dealing with terrorists or terrorist states. According to the ...”

“... a series of inspired readings, McGurl demonstrates that the plantation in Beloved, the mental ward in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and the bus in Robert Olen Butler’s Mr Spaceman all function as metaphors for the creative writing workshop.) McGurl also provides a smart and useful typology of ...”

“... by comparison with Fleur Adcock’s ‘The Soho Hospital for Women’: Doris hardly smokes in the ward – And hardly eats more than a dreamy spoonful – but the corridors and bathrooms reek of her Players Number 10, and the drugtrolley pauses for long minutes by her bed. The flat poem does the difficult thing of seeming to be preoccupied not with itself ...”

“... their invective with classical allusions. From 1789 onwards, this district, with Danton as ward boss, became notorious for hair-trigger revolutionary reflexes. ‘Spontaneous’ street protests could erupt there in an instant, and radical journalists hid their presses and their persons in the warren of houses. When a reorganisation of the city’s ...”

“... to the power of editors. After reading Sidney Colvin’s edition of the letters of his friend Robert Louis Stevenson, he wrote: ‘One has the vague sense of omissions and truncations – one smells the thing unprinted.’ In the years after James’s death, his family in the United States was concerned about his reputation, especially about what Edel ...”

“... both of whom died before she was nineteen. She had one child, John, with her first partner; two, Robert and Shannon, with her second; and two more, Chloe and William, with her third. By the time William was born, Christine had endured beatings, depression and at least one suicide attempt. She drank heavily and abused amphetamines.William was placed on the ...”

“... to revise and correct the pages. When he was released, Wilde gave the manuscript to his friend Robert Ross, who had two copies made. He sent one to Lord Alfred Douglas; the other he later lodged in the British Museum. Sections from Ross’s copy were published in 1905 and in 1908. The complete version, based on the original manuscript, wasn’t published ...”

“... are told) that the Tories were trying to destroy his life, and who attempted an assassination of Robert Peel, the word ‘paranoia’ was never used. Instead, and tellingly, M’Naghten was found insane on grounds of homicidal mania. This must be one of the most famous cases of conspiracy theory in the psychiatric and legal literature, and it is interesting ...”