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“... which ‘can easily become the condescending heartlessness which so attenuates [his] fiction’ (Christopher Ricks); who is ‘rich in what is given to few writers and poor in what is given to most men’ (D.J. Enright). We may sneakily feel it appropriate that Nabokov the mandarin spent the last two decades of his life in a hotel suite in Montreux – after ...”

“... smell that unforgettable smell of Central Europe, acrid, damp and somehow sweaty too, the smell of brown coal, or lignite, this also one of the richest seams in the region and mined for centuries. What you are coming into is the Sudetenland. The Führer’s rhetoric was all about reuniting the millions of Germans in the Sudetenland with the main body of the ...”

“... most at ease. ‘It was a relief,’ he later wrote, ‘to live in among a great gang of black and brown humanity.’ His first visit to the city, in 1924, lasted only a few days, but it left a lasting impression and he was back two years later. He had already made friends in the city’s bars and cafés, and before long he was doing occasional shifts ...”

“... other contributions to the Oxford History. The chapter on Southern Africa in the 19th century by Christopher Saunders and Iain Smith benignly suggests that ‘British troops repeatedly intervened to play a crucial role in supporting settlers who were unable on their own to displace African farmers.’ No attempt is made to describe what ‘intervention’ or ...”

“... the hostility to the euro of the Murdoch press that had helped elect him, soon faded. But Gordon Brown’s firm refusal to abandon sterling, made from his position of strength at the Exchequer, maintained the status quo bequeathed by Major. London would sign up to the Social Chapter that Major had sidestepped, but despite increasingly frantic pressure from ...”

“... By the late Seventies an organisation called the Violet Quill had formed, and its members – Christopher Cox, Robert Ferro, Michael Grumley, Andrew Holleran, Felice Picano, Edmund White and George Whitmore, together with the film critic Vito Russo and the editor and academic George Stambolian – began producing books whose examination of gay ...”

“... Fortyish, leather-jacketed, sombre and Northern (‘Lots of planets have a North,’ he says), Christopher Eccleston played the Doctor as a man both hangdog and arrogant, of an age – had he been human – to have been a child when the show was first broadcast, but with a subsequent life that has shown him disappointment, including (a point somewhat ...”

“... of the Late Victorian literary and artistic worlds: his maternal grandfather was Ford Madox Brown, his uncle William Michael Rossetti. The only possible career for the children of these classes was that of a genius. Ford’s Rossetti cousins had written Greek dramas at the ages of five, nine and fourteen respectively. It became his duty always to aspire ...”

“... side by side, high officials of MI5 and MI6, sea lords, permanent under-secretaries, Lord George-Brown, chiefs of the air staff, nuclear scientists, Lord Wigg and others, stand patiently leaking in the public interest. One can only admire their resolute attention to these distasteful duties.’ Pincher describes the comparison as ‘my most cherished ...”

“... is factual; the biographical asides surrounding that drunken social outcast, the Australian poet Christopher Brennan (whom J.C. Squire believed to be an invention of David Peterley’s, and who is now recognised as Australia’s first poet of international significance) may be checked against a long manuscript in the Mitchell Library at Sydney – by Richard ...”

“... the marginal social acceptability of Mrs Tiggy-Winkle, whose hand, ‘holding the teacup, was very brown, and very, very wrinkly with the soap-suds; and all through her gown and her cap there were hairpins sticking wrong end out; so that Lucie didn’t like to sit too near her.’ Both these essays show off Davenport’s range and gusto, his feats of ...”

“... confusion, a last gasp of flair in the Regency, after which came what the architectural historian Christopher Hussey described as ‘the great debacle of Victorianism’.That this view and these three centuries have come to stand for the essence of British architectural history is largely owed to one book, John Summerson’s Architecture in Britain ...”

“... as well as the unbridgeable, while evoking something that is certainly dangerous to approach. Christopher Prendergast FranceTwo days before the Brexit referendum Le Parisien reported that 34 French businesses had written an open letter intended for the British press – the Sun was mentioned, along with the Times and the Telegraph. ‘French bosses beg ...”

“... on the gramophone) and places I couldn’t visit (the house in St Luke’s Road with a brown plaque in memory of W.H. Hudson) because they either reminded me of her and therefore of death or of death and therefore of her. I kept on telling myself: ‘I mustn’t be rushed.’ Somehow or other, the friends had to be warned off, kept at bay. I ...”

“... Here lives, besides Annie Connor, her daughter Maggie, who is my godmother and a widow, who has a brown raincoat and a checked woollen scarf. She does errands for people and is at their beck and call. Here lives Beryl, Maggie’s daughter, my heroine: a schoolgirl, dimpled and saucy. There is only one doll for which I ever care, and that one, in tribute to ...”