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“... There is realism here too. A good deal of life has been quietly encompassed by the time Cody’s young son is discovering both the love and the deceptions around him, and his long-missing grandfather turns up to remark on the ‘half-right-and-half-wrongness of ...”

“... follies in the Mexican jungle. A few old socialites probably remember James as the wealthy young cad who divorced the dancer Tilly Losch instead of letting her divorce him. Even the judge thought it was disgraceful of him, but reminded the jury that Tilly had used hearsay and malice in the hope of blackening the plaintiff’s character and had failed ...”

“... the level of weapons in the Middle East, ended as a net profit to the Western alliance, fought by young men from Glasgow and Detroit but paid for by the man who likes to call himself the ‘Guardian of the Two Holy Places’, Prince Khaled’s uncle, King Fahd. Could two such partners show each other anything more than mercantile respect? Curiously ...”

“... The name is far from ideal: the two practices have little in common – apart from the murder of young children – but ‘tophet’ is the standard scholarly moniker. Stories of child sacrifice, which appear in more than thirty different Greek and Roman sources, have always made ancient historians uncomfortable. By the 1990s they were dismissed as ...”

“... violence. I have a sense that for some hapless, underemployed and spiritually ill-schooled young Muslims, the Koran is a style accessory that goes hand in hand with martial arts training and watching videos of aeroplanes being blown up. On the other hand, there are those Western infidels, whose reading background is mostly in fiction, who pick up an ...”

“... moral failing of our familiar American reality has been blown way out of proportion. Do you regard young women’s clothes these days as too revealing? Try Onionskin jeans, the transparent ladies’ trousers that show the world your junk. Think corporate mergers are out of control? Book a flight on UnitedContinentalDeltamerican. Baffled by the secret language ...”

“... ten gurus . . . Now, where do the inverted commas around ‘our’ come from? Surely not from young Rapinder, whose monologue is in any case spoken, and whose character has a charming ingenuousness. And what language did his father speak in? It could be Punjabi (with the quote marks around ‘our’ reflecting the son’s cultural ambivalence), but in ...”

“... mujaddara, or Esau’s pottage.’ In 1933, Hourani went up to Oxford, to read PPE: ‘a very thin young man with luminous green eyes and a diaphanous complexion’, according to his friend Charles Issawi. After graduating, he worked for Chatham House and the Foreign Office, before becoming a fellow of Magdalen and subsequently director of the Middle East ...”

“... than the invaders did. ‘Long Walk to Forever’ is a romance, told mostly in dialogue between a young woman about to marry and the man – not her fiancé – she actually loves. In ‘Next Door’, a boy tries to save his neighbours’ marriage with a dedication to a call-in radio show; and in the previously unpublished ‘The Unknown Soldier’, a father ...”

“... people living there at the turn of the last century: Richard Roberts, his wife Anne, their sons Robert, Richard E(llis) and Arthur, their daughter Margaret, and three servants – the cook, Sarah Reece, and two teenage housemaids, Emily Lunmir and Ethel Bailey. The eldest son, William, must have already moved out. In his will, my great-great-grandfather ...”

“... Virginia Woolf​ could be cruelly accurate in her assessments of people. On 24 April 1925 Robert Graves visited her unexpectedly and stayed too long. She described him as ‘a nice ingenuous rattle headed young man’, and declared ‘the poor boy is all emphasis protestation and pose ...”

“... Four possible candidates, varying in attainments, would be T.E. Lawrence, Robert Graves, Peter Fleming (perhaps both Flemings) and Richard Hughes. It makes no difference that Lawrence was half-Irish, the Flemings mostly Scottish, and Hughes partly Welsh. The presidential or father figure of the group would be John Buchan, another ...”

“... Of the initial meeting between Robert Katz, investigative hack and would-be screenwriter, and the late film director Rainer Werner Fassbinder, the former now records that the latter ‘seemed terribly annoyed’. To be honest, admits Katz, Fassbinder was in something of a bate throughout their brief acquaintance: his abiding image of the director is of someone ‘irascible, whining ...”

“... baskets. There are three novels about the First World War and its aftermath as experienced by young soldiers: All Quiet on the Western Front, The Road Back and Three Comrades. The last of these had to be finished in exile. Then there is a set of fictions about the flights and fates of German and Austrian refugees before and during the Second World ...”

“... Columbia Records released King of the Delta Blues Singers – a collection of tracks by Robert Johnson – in 1961, it was the first time in decades that more than a handful of people had access to more than a handful of songs by any country bluesman. Bob Dylan got an acetate from his producer, John Hammond, and played it for his mentor, Dave Van ...”