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“... the window, she has time only to save one object before fleeing: either a compact disc reissue of Sarah Bernhardt declaiming from Phèdre or an old sepia-tinted postcard of Eleonora Duse in D’Annunzio’s La Città morta. Quick! Which to choose? The Bernhardt has always been a source of deep hilarity: given the primitive acoustic equipment (the original ...”

“... The YBAs as a group held street markets, improvised shops and mail order art (Tracey Emin and Sarah Lucas together), and installed their work in unusual and distant derelict sites (their inaugural, epoch-defining group show, Freeze, at Surrey Docks, which Hirst curated). Seen in a room in a national monument the work inevitably loses the social defiance ...”

“... from his father, something he celebrated and vilified. In his early novel The Triumph of Death, he offered a horrifying portrait of the old sensualist: Flesh, flesh, this brutish thing, full of veins, tendons, ligaments, glands, bones, full of instincts and needs; flesh, sweating and stinking; flesh becoming deformed, sick, covered in ...”

“... notable protégés included Wordsworth and Mary Wollstonecraft. For decades, until Johnson’s death in 1809, they came in varying combinations to his weekly dinners, where the vitality of the conversation made up for the dullness of the menu, in which boiled fish and rice pudding loomed large.If Johnson was anything but idle, he was vulnerable in other ...”

“... clots of phlegm. From the surface the chunky brown stuff looks like vomit. ‘Just globs of death out there,’ one diver, Al Walker, says in a Southern accent. ‘Oil so thick it blocks out almost all the light below,’ says another diver. An AP photograph by Dave Martin shows one of the gentle little waves of the Gulf Coast in close-up, a wave on ...”

“... is wrong in gaining respect by being useful and competent, anyway? Nearly forty years after her death, the marmoreal figure beneath the white silk scarf is starting to fade from view, to be replaced by a sexier, more abject version. Christophe Bigot’s novel Un autre m’attend ailleurs, one of the hits of last year’s rentrée littéraire, and soon to be ...”

“... he puts the finishing touches to the second law of thermodynamics, thereby anticipating the heat death of the universe, and a woman’s laugh during love-making. The last is distantly reminiscent of a less learned and much naughtier story by Apollinaire, ‘Le Roi-Lune’, in which a more sophisticated science-fictional device enables its user to intervene ...”

“... James. He was ‘sober, steady, strong and active’. Of course he was a man. Only after Allen’s death, as news of the autopsy spread, did some people begin to express different opinions: they’d always noticed his lack of facial hair, they said, and oddly high voice. But, even then, for every person who feminised Allen in retrospect, another insisted on ...”

“... and at Harper’s, where his power was even greater if less direct, he promoted women writers (Sarah Orne Jewett, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Edith Wharton), African-Americans (Charles Chesnutt, Paul Laurence Dunbar) and immigrants (Abraham Cahan). He also introduced US readers to foreign literature. British literature was already widely read in the cheap ...”

“... Gingrich said it ‘would be like putting a Nazi sign next to the Holocaust Museum’. On Twitter, Sarah Palin wrote: ‘Ground Zero Mosque supporters: doesn’t it stab you in the heart, as it does ours throughout the heartland? Peaceful Muslims, pls refudiate.’ Polls showed that most Americans opposed it and that most residents of Manhattan, who know that ...”

“... undisputed first couple of the British stage. After Irving’s star waned, and even more after his death in 1905, Terry extended her range, not least into the work of her correspondent Bernard Shaw. She died, a national treasure, in 1928. The succeeding generation followed their parents into the business, though inevitably they were overshadowed. Laurence and ...”

“... than Macaulay’s supposed hypocrisy.Johnson was not alone in behaving this way. After the death of her husband in 1766, Macaulay found that as a single woman without a male protector her radical opinions were exposed to heavier criticism, now spiced with innuendo. In August 1770 the Gentleman’s Magazine published a lengthy and at times sexually ...”

“... the treadwheel at Aylesbury Prison was removed in 1843 after three prisoners were crushed to death in a single year). The women, most of whom had been found guilty of prostitution or drunkenness, lived on F Wing, on the eastern side of the prison. Each cell wall had a list showing the daily prison routine. The day began at 5.45 a.m. in summer and 6.45 ...”

“... of forty on 13 November 1973. He left (as the obituarists say) a wife and two children. Before his death he had published six novels, which were completed in the course of little more than a decade, and had written one more, which was to have been the first part of a trilogy about his mother’s death from cancer. He also ...”

“... of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Whatever else, it was a wild time to be alive and come close to death. The fierce young had never seemed more vivid. This is what one flier, Merrill McPeak, remembers from 269 missions:The late 1960s were a kind of confluence of several rivulets – there was the anti-war movement itself, the whole movement towards racial ...”