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“... dismal and worried that the amounts of sex, drugs, violence and crime were inappropriate for the young and contradicted China’s ‘positive and harmonious mainstream spirit’. Hilary Mantel’s collection of stories The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher appeared in Chinese as The Assassination: the censor took the view that announcing the murder of a ...”

“... waists’. Perhaps in that moment, or more likely in this much later one, Margot identified that young woman, shrinking under the conquering gaze of Sir Leslie, as a younger version of herself, the one she dramatised in her novel Octavia, ‘brought up in an atmosphere of Scotch austerity’ but with ‘a spiritual side to her nature which … tugged at her ...”

“... as exotic and off-limits as Thomas Burke’s Chinatown or the paranoid subterranea of Sax Rohmer. (Hugo Barnacle in the Independent was the brave exception, risking lèse-majesty by exposing Original Sin as unoriginal detective fiction: clunking ‘homages’ to Margery Allingham, lousy craftsmanship, and evidence doctored in the best tradition of Agatha ...”

“... was one of the 19th century’s most important scientific guinea pigs. In 1822, the illiterate young French-Canadian was working as a ‘voyageur’ for John Jacob Astor’s fur-trading company in northern Michigan. He was hanging out with a bunch of rowdies in the company store when a shotgun accidentally went off and he was hit below his left nipple. The ...”

“... iron will was an auxiliary of my most bizarre fantasies,’ he wrote, thinking mostly of money and young women. In 1796, at the age of 21, he was sentenced to eight years’ hard labour. A week after arriving at the hulks of Brest, he was heading east, dressed as a sailor, and for the next 13 years he kept on escaping. ‘I escaped from all the galleys of ...”

“... disgraceful, at the moment when Europe is on fire with freedom … to sit and study Euclid or Hugo Grotius?’ he complained in a letter. Now Coleridge had arrived, and in the interests of utopia Southey promptly paired his comrade off with a fiancée he had to hand: Sara Fricker, the vivid and quick sister of his own intended, the much more docile ...”

“... height in order to crack open its shell. Perhaps the beginnings of this thought had struck the young Aurora when she was doing her embroidery: she had been taught ‘The trick of Greek/And Latin’ by her father before he died. The young Elizabeth Barrett, too, was surrounded by classical texts at her father’s house in ...”

“... found it hard to decide whether he was a whimsical idealist or a provocateur. Only Minna, a young German employed there as a hostess, signed his petition urging the French government to take a stand on wildlife protection. The clientele assumed she had fallen in love with him. Morel then took to the bush and launched a vigilante campaign involving ...”

“... fact – was her ability to make the most improbable people go cuckoo over her. An otherwise mopey young D.H. Lawrence, for example. In 1908, having seen her perform one of her signature roles – Marguerite, the doomed courtesan in La Dame aux camélias – Lawrence sounds like a decadent schoolgirl on heat: ‘Oh, to see her, and to hear her, a wild ...”

“... the share price based on the number of letters they’d posted over their lifetime. According to Hugo Young, Thatcher had to be talked into Right to Buy by a desperate Edward Heath, then her leader, who’d been persuaded by his friend Pierre Trudeau after his electoral defeat in February 1974 that he needed a fistful of populist policies. No wonder ...”

“... a particular taste for Mahler and for the Elizabethan composer John Dowland). In 1947 the awkward young man with literary ambitions moved into a flat with other young littérateurs, including the future avant-garde poets Jack Spicer and Robert Duncan. He also took a job in a record store, where he met his first wife (they ...”

“... buts, and the Fourteenth Amendment ensured that it applied just as strictly to the states. Justice Hugo Black, that stickler of sticklers, who served on the court from 1937 to 1971, had been a member of the KKK in his youth, though his judgments were not consistently racist. He was on the side of the angels in the cause célèbre of Brown v. Board of ...”

“... that it is somewhat Anglocentric. The treatment of Mazzini’s early years and the foundation of Young Italy is a little sketchy, and the book only really comes to life with his arrival in England in 1837, at the age of 32. One learns rather more about his English correspondents than about his Italian ones. Still, there are compensatory rewards. Mazzini ...”

“... of a worthy but rather stodgy 1994 biography by the chemist Dietrich Stoltzenberg, whose father, Hugo, worked with Haber on poison gas. Charles is a journalist, and was drawn to Haber by way of an earlier book, Lords of the Harvest: Biotechnology, Big Money, and the Future of Food (2001). Between Genius and Genocide goes into far less detail about Haber’s ...”

“... iron, but polished and glassy around which, and reflected in the black shine, stood Emily, Hugo, Gerald, her officer father, her large laughing gallant mother, and little Denis, the four-year-old criminal clinging to Gerald’s hand.’ Another mysterious She appears and is so beautiful the iron egg breaks at her gaze, and after some hesitation She ...”