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“... Virginia Woolf​ could be cruelly accurate in her assessments of people. On 24 April 1925 Robert Graves visited her unexpectedly and stayed too long. She described him as ‘a nice ingenuous rattle headed young man’, and declared ‘the poor boy is all emphasis protestation and pose ...”

“... fitted out with giant refrigeration chambers: but these were replaced with berths, and she spent her first few years carrying troops to the Boer War. In 1900 she carried the entire Dublin – Denbigh Imperial Yeomanry, along with their many horses, to the South African coast. The ship was later brought into service on the Beaver Line, a company of ships ...”

“... Times reviews of the novels of Maude Hutchins – from the 1950s and early 1960s especially, when her reputation was at its height – and one is instantly struck by it: the old-maid-like embarrassment she aroused in her critics. Not one of them could get through an essay about her, it ...”

“... falls in love with Jean Gabin’s in La Grande Illusion; Lisa Fittko, a passeuse who risked her life guiding scores of refugees out of France across the Pyrenees – among them Walter Benjamin – before leaving by the same route. Several artists produced memorial sketches and artefacts, a practice begun by Spanish Republicans. Charlotte Salomon, the ...”

“... be the object of a quest? Aha! In that clifftop house he’d left a widow, she who was a legend in her own right. He had been her ultimate husband. First (silent movies) she’d hitched up with an acrobatic cowboy and, when a pinto threw him, she’d joined a soi-disant Viennese tenor for a season of kitschissimo musicals ...”

“... the beauty of which Glob celebrated in what was in the English version slightly fruity prose: ‘Majesty and gentleness still stamp his features as they did when he was alive,’ he says of the Tollund Man. Their state of preservation was remarkable and oddly disorientating: one peat-cutter who found such a body, according to Glob, said that ‘if he had ...”

“... a simple ‘Indian’ peasant called Juan Diego, promising to watch over the land as a mother over her children. Sanchez, however, now described her as ‘this ... sacred criolla’, who would make Mexico the New Jerusalem. From this book on, the cult quickly gained immense popularity among all groups in the vice-royalty’s ...”

“... occasionally, through the cynical eyes of others. ‘What danger can we be in, so close to His Majesty?’ one character asks another. ‘Catching a good bout of diarrhoea, for a start,’ comes the reply. This Napoleon is a coarse, tired, flabby, flatulent monster, almost wholly indifferent to the massive suffering he causes. Rambaud conveys the horrors ...”

“... literary registers. Abraham’s wife, Sarah, is for a long time barren, so she proposes that her maid Hagar sleep with Abraham to provide him with an heir. Hagar conceives, and when she sees that she is pregnant, ‘her mistress was despised in her eyes.’ It is one of those ...”

“... There is only one baby in The Man without Qualities. Her mother is Rachel, maid to Ermelinda Tuzzi who is the wife of Section Chief Tuzzi, a bureaucrat in the service of the Imperial Austrian Government in Vienna. The year is 1913: Rachel was 19 and believed in miracles. She had been born in a squalid shack in Poland, where a mezuzah hung on the doorpost and the soil came up through the cracks in the floorboards ...”

“... portfolio of amateur snuff photography, including still and video footage of the mummified head of her pet kitten. Morris quotes an Iraqi who described Harman as ‘one of the good ones’. The book humanises her, with frequent excerpts from her letters home. And indeed Harman, who would ...”

“... word-besotted WWII-vet generation, he would retain this Old Man River rumble in prose, a purple majesty. As the titles of his books indicate – Lie Down in Darkness (taken from Sir Thomas Browne), Set This House on Fire (John Donne) and Darkness Visible (Milton) – he strove for canonical grandeur and stature, never dallying in quick-buck genre ...”

“... the Shah of Persia. At a lavish ball, the Shah spots a beautiful Viennese noblewoman and requests her company for the night. A diplomatic incident is averted only when Captain Baron Taittinger, currently on secondment to the Court, proposes that another woman be substituted for the favoured lady. This other woman, who resembles the aristocrat, is a former ...”

“... the Essex Rebellion. The play concludes with the future Elizabeth I’s christening, during which her godfather, Thomas Cranmer, the archbishop of Canterbury, is inspired to prophesy:In her days every man shall eat in safety,Under his own vine, what he plants; and singThe merry songs of peace to all his neighbours:God shall ...”

“... VI to the Snowdon skyline, he pointed to the peak of Cnicht, remarking, ‘That bit there, Your Majesty, is my own’; then, recalling his prior duty to the idea of a Snowdonia National Park, quickly added: ‘but keep it under your Crown.’ Jonah Jones has a slightly different version of the same story, like anyone who heard it from Clough himself. In his ...”