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“... my father came out of his office, she said without looking up – clip-clop, clickety-clop – ‘Frank, do you think we could get a modesty panel affixed to this desk?’ By the time I came back, at Christmas, I got her desk because she had gone to work at Kaplan’s, across Albert Square. ‘Something of a supervisory element to it,’ my father ...”

“... too large and too unpalatable (too ‘strong’ in artspeak) to be hung in anyone’s house; like Frank Stella’s late sculptures, say, they are suitable only for museums, and most museums already have one. Finally, they are ‘artists’ of some sort, but they first became celebrated in 1969 for covering their faces and hands with metallic paint and ...”

“... at least, responsive to drug treatment. The bacteriological paradigm found an ardent advocate in Frank Billings, president of the American Medical Association at the turn of the century, who declared war on sepsis, urging surgical intervention, from the teeth to the tonsils to the intestines, to ‘make sure that all sources of focal infection have been ...”

“... of the strengths and failings popularly associated with Victoria’s reign. In that, he resembles Thomas Arnold, a year his junior: the first of Strachey’s ‘eminent Victorians’, he actually died less than five years into the Queen’s reign. But whereas Arnold was a liberal Anglican of passionate faith, Grote’s spiritual home is among the ...”

“... of this book, Daniel Grader, sees Macrone as hailing from Scotland, on the say-so of the poet Thomas Moore; others favour the Isle of Man. Hogg met him when he was working as a shopman in Mayfair, and was then published by Macrone when Macrone went into partnership with James Cochrane in Pall Mall. Hogg came to like the two men, together with Cochrane’s ...”

“... Paul de Man was born in 1919 to a high-bourgeois Antwerp family, Flemish but sympathetic to French language and culture. He studied at the Free University of Brussels, where he wrote some pieces for student magazines. When the Germans occupied Belgium in 1940 he and his wife fled, but were turned back at the Spanish frontier and resumed life in Brussels ...”

“... sensibility’ always contained a European admixture, and Figes criticises those – Rilke, Thomas Mann, Virginia Woolf – who swallowed whole the myth of a completely indigenous ‘Russian soul’. All the great Russians ‘were Europeans too, and the two identities were intertwined and mutually dependent in a variety of ways’. Natasha’s Dance ...”

“... and the war, Williams was one of a notable band recruited to the Oxford Extra-Mural Delegacy by Thomas Hodgkin. Thomas, who was my dearly beloved tutor and friend, often described to me, not without bitterness, how the Delegacy fell victim to an early form of British McCarthyism. Many of those ...”

“... living thing, creature, or being is the full achievement of itself,’ he says in his Study of Thomas Hardy, a sentiment which might have been uttered by John Stuart Mill himself. But what Lawrence meant by ‘self’ was not to be confused with the ‘cheap egotism’ of the ‘self-conscious little ego’ described by modern individualism. ‘I know that ...”

“... goods up the River Parrett under the name of the Somerset Trading Company. Robert’s younger son, Thomas, married the niece of Samuel Stuckey, the founder of Stuckey’s Bank, a sizeable local house which had already swallowed up several tiddlers. Thomas rose to become vice-chairman, and so in due course did his son ...”

“... The Barracks (1963), The Dark (1965) – and in some of his best short stories. ‘Gugering,’ Frank Shovlin explains in a footnote, ‘is the act of dropping seed potatoes into holes in the ground.’ Uncle Pat, he suggests, is a model for the fictional character ‘The Shah’ in McGahern’s final novel, That They Might Face the Rising Sun ...”

“... an ogre. Speer had ‘a face you could see anywhere, in any subway, in any drugstore’, while Frank ‘looked patient and composed, like a waiter when the restaurant is not busy’. At the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem, she paints a more sinister, Baconesque portrait of the defendant caged in bullet-proof glass, occasionally producing a large white ...”

“... on, sustained by his mother’s favourite quotation (which stands as the novel’s epigraph): Anne Frank’s ‘In spite of everything, I still believe people are really good at heart.’ But, of course, Anne wrote that before the Germans got her. Thomas Keneally likes to run his fiction close to historical fact. An appended ...”

“... translated for this work.’ That is untrue. There are the familiar translations by Douglas Hyde, Frank O’Connor, Cecile O’Rahilly, Standish O’Grady, Thomas Kinsella and others, as well as the contributing editors. The advantage here is that readers taken with these excerpts should be able to obtain fuller texts ...”

“... smaller numbers, often challenging, however subtly, the received idea of the Irish immigrant. Even Frank McCourt. Between them, Angela’s Ashes and ’Tis have sold more than five million copies in the United States – and ’Tis has only just come out in paperback.† McCourt and his brothers have had their lives recorded for the movies, and anyone writing ...”