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“... and the start of the 19th, the average length of a marriage was twenty years (the figures are Peter Laslett’s). Today, couples who don’t divorce can expect to be together for forty or fifty years – ‘for a good number of people it is a great deal too long.’ In this context Gathorne-Hardy’s seemingly daft proposition, ‘divorce – the modern ...”

“... productive anarchy; everyone did what they loved best,’ the composer and one-time producer, Alexander Goehr remembers – and as a medium for listening to. Peter Maxwell Davies recalls how, as a boy on a council estate in Swinton, he would listen ‘every evening, more or less from the moment it started till the ...”

“... spent hours drinking and kibitzing with her parents. Nemtsov was furious that the local governor, Alexander Tkachev, who was presumably in charge of most of the harassment directed at his campaign, could treat him so shabbily. ‘You’re from New York,’ Nemtsov said at one point, turning to me. ‘Who is more popular in New York, Nemtsov or Tkachev?’ The ...”

“... from the US – regular production of polonium-210 came to an end. On​ 1 November 2006, Alexander Litvinenko, a former FSB agent, drank a cup of tea in the Pine Bar of the Millennium Hotel in Mayfair with two colleagues – ex-KGB officers Dmitry Kovtun and Andrei Lugovoi – who had recently arrived from Russia. He began vomiting and was taken to ...”

“... come to overlay the natural world in ways that could not be obviated or absorbed. And today, as Alexander Kluge has suggested, we face a ‘third nature’, a world not only produced by machines but also run through networks largely beyond our perception, let alone our mastery. ‘If the public sphere, the arts, the relationship to people no longer grows ...”

“... is at constant risk from a bout of amnesia. In his recent book on the office of Prime Minister, Peter Hennessy tells the story of how Whitehall forgot how to declare war.* When officials thought it might be useful to know how to do it, just after the invasion of the Falkland Islands by Argentina in 1982, they found that the relevant file was missing. It ...”

“... Tynan was the first, and flamboyantly the foremost, of their number. In fact, his father Sir Peter Peacock, chairman of the family chain of Midland drapery stores, could easily have sent him to a public school, and wished to. But his mother, Letitia Rose Tynan, feared that if he left home, he might discover his parents’ guilty secret. She and Sir ...”

“... Independence, to its rise in the Revolution. Both Melville’s grandfathers, Thomas Melvill and Peter Gansevoort, were Revolutionary heroes – Thomas for being among the Sons of Liberty who defied the colonial tax-gatherers in the Boston Tea Party in 1773, Peter for withstanding a British siege in 1777 (after which he ...”

“... According to Jacques-Philippe Voïart, the history painter Angélique Mongez’s prize-winning Alexander Mourning the Death of Darius’s Wife (1804) was a narrative failure, too focused on the emotions of ‘the accompanying women’ and not enough on Alexander. Others were willing to praise ambitious narrative pictures ...”

“... and Edwardians. But Wells adds that ‘there would be no killing, no lethal chambers’. Peter Morton in The Vital Science (1984) shows how Wells, following such precursors as Alfred Russel Wallace and Grant Allen, soon became the champion of a ‘social reformist eugenics’, looking to female emancipation, birth control and the Welfare State to ...”

“... sketch, of which the finest example is ‘Aunt Helen’. Eliot, whom Yeats had spoken of as ‘an Alexander Pope ... satirist rather than poet’, is not represented in this volume at all. It is in general a relief, in the later sections of this volume, to turn from the strident coupleteering patnesses of Campbell and others to the fondly nurtured exactitudes ...”

“... back tae snowk at his bockin ... Grumphie douks i the burn, an syne rows again i the glaur. (II Peter 2.22: ‘The dog is turned to his own vomit again; and the sow that was washed to her wallowing in the mire’). Except perhaps for a few scholars, no one, however Scots, is going to know all the words in this translation; most Scots will not know a great ...”

“... Italian city. Hardly a minnow can have slipped through the net, though it has landed one whopper: Alexander Trippel, who was Swiss and described by a German in 1782 as ‘the greatest sculptor in Rome, that is to say the world’, is included as if he were an obscure British artist known only because he exported a relief and a portrait bust. This slip is of ...”

“... is common with cult journals, Die Fackel’s subscribers were as illustrious as its contributors: Peter Altenberg, Kokoschka, Adolf Loos, Heinrich Mann, Schoenberg, Strindberg, Trakl and Wedekind (whose play Spring Awakening Franzen translated in 1986 and published in 2007). Kafka was a loyal reader, as was Benjamin, who regarded Die Fackel as the literary ...”

“... Incidentally, they know you know they know you know the code.’ Peter Ustinov’s Cold War satire Romanoff and Juliet (1956) could have been about Salisbury Court, the London home in the early 1580s of the French Ambassador to the Court of Elizabeth I, Michel de Castelnau, seigneur de Mauvissière, an establishment described by John Bossy as ‘zany, convivial and leak-ridden ...”