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“... of the absurd – swelled up and burst in the 1900s, and salaams have been performed in front of Richard Olney’s Simple French Food by some of the most precious amateurs in New York and London. (Oddly, when so many food books of little worth are published here – the unspeakable in pursuit of the edible – this frugally illustrated, decently produced ...”

“... one of the most familiar scenes from the life of Wilde: the bad moment outside Swan and Edgar’s. Richard Ellmann’s biography says that, as Wilde caught sight of ‘the painted boys on the pavement’ outside the department store, he was struck by an overwhelming sense of catastrophe. Holland traces the story back to 1930 and to Ada Leverson, who – he ...”

“... yellow sands’, in which a succession of voices discourse on the fairy painter and parricide Richard Dadd (odd that no one comments on the singular aptness of his surname). Dadd, having taken his father for the devil, went at him in Cobham Park with a spring-knife – a weapon more effective than Christy Mahon’s loy. Poor dad – or, if you like, poor ...”

“... The Reading Room of the British Museum is now completed, and if London had nothing but this hall of the blessed, scholars would make it well worth their while to make a pilgrimage here. All the sorrows of the outside would disappear in the mighty rotunda, and it is so quiet in this region of the eternal spirits that one can follow a thought into one’s inmost recesses ...”

“... liked a watch with a strap made of crocodile skin … The blast of a gunshot followed her down the hall, then a thin scream. Someone always died in the Saturday play, and never from natural causes. She hadn’t bothered going into Mother’s room to say goodnight. She wouldn’t be back yet. She was down at the railway station reading her library book by the ...”

“... disable Iran’s nuclear programme.But there were other voices. In an article in Foreign Affairs, Richard Haass, a former head of policy planning at the US State Department, outlined a compromise that would limit but not end Iran’s ability to enrich uranium: it would be allowed to continue enriching uranium for use in civil nuclear reactors to produce ...”

“... currently in charge of the Labour Party. Ada Salter refused to fly the Union Jack from the town hall, preferring a red flag blazoned with local emblems; Alfred declared they were ‘out to abolish the working classes as such and create a classless society. That is what we mean by socialism.’ The Times declared him an extremist.The afterlives of the ...”

“... of many islets’, marked by local specialisms. Birmingham was strong in industrial sociology, and Richard Hoggart and Stuart Hall had pioneered cultural studies there. Thirty-odd miles away at Leicester University, Ilya Neustadt and Norbert Elias gave the sociology department a more theoretical and international ...”

“... spirit left to be broken. All this we should have known long ago. Think of the career of the great Richard Topcliffe, chief ‘poursuivant’ or persecutor of Jesuit missionaries in the reign of Elizabeth I. Topcliffe is perhaps not much spoken of except by historians of the Catholic martyrs or close students of Donne, who mentioned him in passing but deleted ...”

“... and his chief bombing officer are shown seeking some light relief from their training at a music hall. As the star of the show goes into her song-and-dance routine, Gibson (played by Richard Todd) sits up in his seat as though electrified: a piece of body language the seasoned cinema-goer is likely to interpret as a sign ...”

“... them: Dickens was a magician in another sense, the sense that goes with the melodrama and music hall, and tribal magicians are not creators as Dickens and Hardy were. They do not invent a whole natural world of their own in which the client can lead a solitary life; their appeal has something communal, as the Borges image suggests, and the shareability of a ...”

“... in 1834 as ‘a good exemplification of the old adage “much cry and little wool”’. At Exeter Hall on the Strand in 1837, the Morning Chronicle reported that he spent three hours ‘cutting, hammering and chopping’ at a mummy ‘with very strong tools’, but eventually had to give up. (He had by this time left Charing Cross Hospital after ‘a murky ...”

“... he got lost again: ‘As I could not identify any of the offices as yours I hung about in the hall for some time and then decided that you had gone.’ He can’t write enough poetry to make anyone happy. To the publisher John Rodker, who wants to issue a volume of new poems, he confesses sheepishly: ‘I am sorry for the misunderstanding. I don’t think ...”

“... his family), Marx found the city in uproar, with mass demonstrations and workers storming the City Hall under the direction of the communists, led by the physician Andreas Gottschalk, a man not prepared to brook any rivalry from the returning émigrés. Marx, who despised Gottschalk for his refusal to organise a proper insurrection to inaugurate a ...”

“... your guts! Why are you looking at me?”’ Kaneda took Ono by the hand and led him into the main hall of the temple. ‘He told me to sit down. I was not myself. I still remember that strong feeling of resistance. But part of me was also relieved – I wanted to be helped, and to believe in the priest. The part of me that was still me wanted to be ...”