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“... Moscow, where he cultivated a Byronic image and gained a reputation for insolence. He fell in with David Burlyuk, a Cubist painter who recognised his poetic talent, and the two of them got together with the avant-garde poets Velimir Khlebnikov and Aleksei Kruchenykh to release the first Futurist almanac, A Slap in the Face of Public Taste. They announced that ...”

“... later,New York was a far different city on this day than it was when he assumed the mayoralty from David Dinkins … You could read it in the numbers and feel it in the streets.Crime was down nearly 60 per cent. The murder rate was even lower; 1250 fewer New Yorkers were killed in 2000 than in 1993. Car thieves stole more than 111,000 vehicles the year before ...”

“... to fabricate a first bomb,’ and eight or nine kilograms for subsequent ones. According to David Albright, one of the best and most reliable independent experts, ‘the most credible worst-case estimate’ is that the North may have between 6.3 and 8.5 kg of reprocessed plutonium. In other words, the CIA’s educated guess, endlessly repeated in the ...”

“... about Netanyahu’s predecessors, they had their fascination, from the monastic self-discipline of David Ben-Gurion to the gluttony of Ariel Sharon. Netanyahu comes across as a hollow figure: a ‘marketing man’, in the words of Max Hastings, who met him while writing a biography of his brother Jonathan. Yet Netanyahu can hardly be avoided, or his survival ...”

“... began to broaden his understanding of Marxism. By the 1970s he is writing in New Society about Victor Serge and Walter Benjamin, independent Marxists who were opposed to the Party line or idiosyncratic in their interpretation of Marxist theory. Serge was a former anarchist who was soon expelled from the Party and ended up as a ‘left ...”

“... to pose, the enraged Freud painted over her face and inserted that of his long-time assistant David Dawson. But the baby had not caused offence, so was not painted out, with the result that a naked and strangely breasted Dawson is now seen feeding the child. Freud’s American dealer assumed the picture would be unsellable; it was bought by the first ...”

“... Oxford Books have been anything from six hundred pages to a thousand; Davie’s predecessor David Cecil’s Christian Verse was six hundred, while Davie runs to not more than half that. Where Cecil’s 1940 volume gave 40 pages to Browning and 14 to Coventry Patmore, in Davie both poets have sunk without trace. But such disappearances are only ...”

“... international Tribunal. She tried to lay to rest any ambivalent associations: ‘this will be no victor’s Tribunal. The only victor that will prevail in this endeavour will be the truth.’ Fine words, but little practical help to the team working on the original statute for the ICTY. They knew very well that while ...”

“... The Western Canon, as though its author – and its editor, since the book has been assembled by David Mikics from pieces written over the past half-century – was provoked by the reaction to his earlier book into seeing a wider world of writing. There are chapters on black authors (Ralph Ellison, Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison, James Baldwin, Robert ...”

“... citizens who felt the end was near. The story which sticks in my mind was told to me by Victor Weisskopf, whose friend, the physicist Leo Szilard, carrying his worldly belongings in a single suitcase, appeared on Weisskopf’s doorstep in Switzerland within 24 hours of Kennedy’s speech and solemnly announced: ‘I am the first refugee of World War ...”

“... Gorey was reading by the age of three and at eight had begun working his way through the complete Victor Hugo, for reasons he could not in later life reconstruct. His parents’ unhappy marriage, their divorce and (much later) remarriage, were no doubt unsettling, but there was no Gothic horror in his upbringing of the sort that his more literal-minded ...”

“... with the ferocity of Ford’s detractors (they seem to close their eyes to watch his films), but David Thomson makes a mighty-seeming case against him in his Biographical Dictionary of the Cinema. From the 1975 edition: Ford’s male chauvinism believes in uniforms, drunken candour, fresh-faced little women (though never sexuality), a gallery of supporting ...”

“... When new legislation made it illegal for Aspinall to play in his own casino he sold it in 1972 to Victor Lownes, owner of the Playboy Club. The old circle was breaking up. The Luards decamped to live cheaply in Spain, where their most grandiose joint enterprise with Elwes, a luxury villa complex called El Cuartón, was soon quite literally sinking. Ian and ...”

“... play. We all have a cup of tea and there’s a lot of laughing, particularly as the actors from David Hare’s The Power of Yes begin to drift out after their matinée. One of them is Simon Williams, a tall distinguished figure, handsome throughout his life just as was his father, whom I remember from a film I saw as a child, One of Our Aircraft Is ...”

“... later he moved to Chemistry & Industry, where he remained until The Drowned World was published by Victor Gollancz in 1962. Mary had two more children, daughters, in 1957 and 1959. They lived in a series of flats in south-west London before settling in a small house with a garden in Shepperton in 1960. Ballard still lives there, on the face of it a remarkable ...”