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“... was small, with beautiful eyes), a penniless orphan, ‘different’. Her lover rides a hundred miles to see her, and her dull cousin’s fiancé, Gregory Rose, leaves everything to follow her. ‘What makes you all love me so?’ she asks. But Olive, by her own account, had read, at this stage, no other fiction at all. And the African Farm, as it goes ...”

“... readiness to immerse himself in the archives and tease out the meaning of details reminds me of Richard Cobb, though perhaps a more appropriate comparison would be another famous archival mole, Jules Michelet, who also wrote about women and the sea, and tried to unravel the substance from which France was made. As Michelet put it in a famous passage, which ...”

“... achievement, combining the restless determination of Tschiffely’s Ride with a touch of Richard Jefferies or (among recent American naturalist-travellers) Edwin Way Teale. Moon uses a camera and a tape-recorder competently, but as aides-mémoire, not as mistresses. Between these covers are locked the perceptions of a reluctant solitary, perhaps, but ...”

“... the Reagan Administration. Long queues of voters waiting in the broiling sunshine or trudging for miles on country roads produced a powerful image of eager, sturdy democracy, which almost every American reporter and TV commentator fell for. In fact, the turn-out was barely half as high as the Administration claimed: an analysis by researchers at the ...”

“... to the national well-being?’ muses Frank Bascombe, heir apparent to Rabbit and the narrator of Richard Ford’s Independence Day) and gangs and drugs are just as plentiful as in the inner city, stories of contemporary suburbia no longer serve our appetite for myth. Allusions to simpler times crop up in everything from the retro white-picket fence homes of ...”

“... of his joyless couplings. He reached his lowest point when he found himself driving hundreds of miles one weekend with the sole purpose of seducing a friend’s teenage daughter, before pulling himself back from the brink of such a disastrous action. From this nadir and, we are led to believe, turning-point, Ryan returns to an episode of childhood ...”

“... Castor does not discuss this part of her career) and then when she ruled England briefly for Richard I as queen mother. This type of queenship can also be glimpsed in Castor’s references to Stephen’s consort, another Matilda, who raised an army to support him after his capture, and was praised by the Gesta Stephani for forgetting a woman’s weakness ...”

“... Well’. We don’t need to have read any of the Freud which James would have run several miles from to interpret what Mr Dunning in ‘Casting the Runes’ finds when he puts his hand into the well-known nook under his pillow: ‘What he touched was, according to his account, a mouth, with teeth, and with hair about it, and, he declares, not the ...”

“... It is concerned with ‘knowingness’. Few works are more indisputably travel writing than Richard Burton’s Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to Al Madinah and Meccah (1855): every detail in his ‘pilgrimage’ – the attempt by an infidel Westerner to pass himself off as an Arab pilgrim and gain sight of the Muslim sacred places and ceremonies ...”

“... significance simply in terms of the magnitude of what was happening. The African-American writer Richard Wright reported: I’d no sooner climbed into the press gallery and looked down upon the vast assembly of delegates, many of them clad in their exotic national costumes, than I could sense an important junction of history in the making. In the early and ...”

“... be seen.’Some special forces memoirs have been so popular they have led to pulp franchises. Richard Marcinko, the first commander of SEAL Team Six, later convicted of defrauding the US government, published his bestselling memoir, Rogue Warrior, in 1992 and followed it with more than a dozen thrillers fictionalising various SEAL missions. Eric ...”

“... of 1831, he and about fifty partisans made a last crazy dash across the bay and stormed ashore six miles east of Gibraltar. They were rounded up by loyalist troops, imprisoned in the Convento del Carmen on the hills above Málaga, and on 11 December taken down to the beach and shot by a firing squad, two at a time. There were five British victims: four ...”

“... where I could take him. He asked me where I was going. I said I was staying at Berkhamsted, thirty miles out, but no matter, I should be delighted to take him home first. Where was he staying, I asked? At his club, the Athenaeum, he said, and we set off in that direction. I was no longer suffering from loss of memory: there was no difficulty now about the ...”

“... perjury in 1999 he has written books about himself and other public figures who fell from grace: Richard Nixon, his former special counsel Charles Colson, and John Newton, the Anglican hymn-writer who once captained slave ships. Nazarbayev’s life story doesn’t have this trajectory. It is 19 years since he became his republic’s leader and his rise has ...”

“... Tom Dudley, and a crew of three named Stephens, Brooks and Parker drifted on a dinghy for 1050 miles in 24 days, until they were rescued by the German barque Moctezuma some nine hundred and ninety miles east of Rio de Janeiro on 29 July. At that moment, Dudley was to say, ‘their hearts were in their mouths’: ‘a ...”