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“... were obviously the Mojave, peopled by tribes lifted straight from Doughty, but re-equipped with ray-guns. And the ultimate classic of desert SF, Frank Herbert’s Dune, even echoes Doughty in its format, with an apparatus of appendices and a map. But is that tribute paid to the book or the legend? Even among the canon of Great Unread Masterpieces, Travels ...”

“... Queen Elizabeth and Mary Queen of Scots? My natural bent is to think that he is chatting the man up: I do not find him saying such things in his official correspondence with Paris; nor do I find that on such grounds kings and councillors made their decisions about the destinies of state and church. Not Queen Elizabeth, who would surely have giggled if ...”

“... with the disdain she feared at all the shops she usually went to – Daniel Neal did not X-ray any old child’s feet. The only place that accepted them was a gloomy little cobbler’s shop which, as I remember it, was hidden away under a near derelict railway arch in the fashion wasteland of King’s Cross. The Dickensian and mawkish nature of the ...”

“... afford endless hours of pleasure to fanatics. The same goes for great specialist bowlers such as Ray Lindwall or Lance Gibbs. Any one of those, and many, many others like them, can break the balance. They do so by steady control, correctness, discipline, line, length, rhythm. They are specialists up against other specialists, and even a BBC commentator can ...”

“... feels that the 17th-century Dutch walls in Vermeer’s paintings are ‘as old as Egypt’. As a man Vermeer is little more to us than a signature. There is virtually no evidence for his artistic training, his character, or even his appearance, and his modest oeuvre – 35 canvases, not counting a couple of debatably attributed pieces – was unknown to the ...”

“... Rutherford was one of my early heroes, and Wilson’s biography of this great and lovable man has enlivened and enlarged, rather than debunked, my youthful image. Rutherford was the man who created the atomic age: a farmer’s boy from New Zealand whose brilliance and Herculean energy brought him the Presidency of the Royal Society, a peerage, and honours from all over the world ...”

“... goes: but it is left to the reader to try to fit the pieces together into an intelligible whole. Ray Monk’s biography of Wittgenstein succeeded in bringing an enigmatic character to life, but Moorehead’s book leaves the real Russell just out of reach – a mere compilation of deeds and words. She seems not to be able to enter into Russell’s anguished ...”

“... over? I grew up in the 1950s, in North Hollywood, where a common sight from a passing car was a man in his thirties, alone in his front yard, mowing the lawn with a push mower – a hard shove, a stop, and another shove with that metallic rush of blades. In American films of the 1940s and 1950s, Robert Ryan (1909-73) seemed one of the angry men of the war ...”

“... records. It wasn’t as much fun, except for the stunning and disturbing first visit to Britain of Ray Charles, whom I had first heard as one of a handful of whites in a corner of a vast rock-and-roll dance in Oakland, California, when he was still known only to the black public. They did not dance much while he sang. By now not quite a major pop star but ...”

“... he had sat through the saga of Jennifer’s Ear, a deal of ruin in electioneering. The Grand Old Man was actually no slouch at the game of media manipulation. It was he, above all, who succeeded in using the new technology of his day to project his policy and his personality in the country. While other leaders rested on the reputation they had made in ...”

“... women of nobility with black attendants, and the upturned face and twisting figure of the young man seem angled to some person we cannot see. The girl is probably Robert’s daughter Margaret. Illuminated from the right while all else is lit from the left, she is almost certainly copied from another portrait. The painter, a Dutchman in East Anglia ...”

“... rather than with real rage or outrage, one recalls the blustering world of George Brown, Ray Gunter and Robert Mellish – those Labour dinosaurs who used to invoke the common man but who, while envying the Tories their vowels and their ease of manner, would turn into RSMs when confronted with party dissidents like ...”

“... and some of which it is hoped never will (Renoir is moved at one point by ‘the love of this man for squirrels, and his passion for apple trees’). The odd letter to someone with whom there is no sustained correspondence, but which gives a good indication of his social or professional circle: James Mason, Charlie Chaplin, Pablo Picasso. There are ...”

“... to get rather low, even understated scores on this machine. I tell myself that pinball is a young man’s game. When I was a postgraduate student at London University, I used to get up at 11, walk over to the School of Oriental and African Studies and, if no one had done so already, switch on the pinball machine in the corner of the junior common room and ...”

“... correspondent is concerned, this is a model biography. His concentration on his subject as action-man imposes, however, its own limitations. Just as Moorehead found the adjustment to the more routine rhythms of the postwar world difficult, so does his biographer. Most of the excitement and élan goes out of his narrative once he has to settle down to telling ...”