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“... on. As I was beginning this review, I saw a story on the front page of the Daily Telegraph (25 May) headlined ‘Prince in the Tower “died a bricklayer”.’ The report, later taken up by other papers, was based on a book by David Baldwin, who asserts that the elder prince, the deposed Edward V, died of natural causes and that, after ...”

“... to life, unusual in a man in his late forties. The hero of After My Fashion is a self-portrait. Richard Storm has returned to Sussex from Paris, where he has made a name for himself with his critical appreciations of modern French writers. The first man he meets is a young painter, Robert Canyot, a traditionalist who thinks ...”

“... to its adherents, it is only an hypothesis, like any other. The degree of assent you give it may depend on how little or how much the process is complicated by bringing into it the possibilities of human resistance and discrimination with respect to signs. Or it may depend on the degree to which the process is or is ...”

“... anything nowadays except the theory of science? His own answer to this question is affirmative. It may seem that the so-called ‘analytic’ tradition in philosophy – the tradition that goes back to Frege and Russell and whose most prominent living representatives are Quine, Davidson, Dummett and Putnam – must return a negative answer. For that tradition ...”

“... A fight between two males passes through three main stages, at any of which one of the contestants may back out. They start with broadside displays, move on to tail beating, and then to harmless mouth fighting, in which the pair grip and pull each other by the mouth. The rules of the contest are, according to Lorenz, strictly obeyed. Each fish only moves on to ...”

“... course, and speed limits were quickly reintroduced, just as the Germans were abolishing them. In May 1939, the Nazi regime finally admitted defeat, and reimposed speed restrictions on all roads except motorways, which continue to be without them and are the most terrifying roads in Europe. Cars, Hitler proclaimed, had to lose their ‘class-based and, as a ...”

“... suffered their first serious reversal when they were halted by the Red Army before Moscow. In May 1942 the first thousand-bomber raid on Cologne inaugurated nearly two years of mass destruction of Germany’s towns and cities. Just under a year later came the catastrophe of Stalingrad, where the remnants of the German 6th Army were forced to surrender in ...”

“... of two interviews with Hitler allegedly conducted in 1931 by a senior newspaper editor called Richard Breiting, and subsequently supposedly buried by him in a canister in his garden because he feared for his life should they be discovered. The interviews showed Hitler was making plans to burn the Reichstag two years before the event. ‘In my ...”

“... from the surely self-evident proposition that great poets don’t have to be good men; that Hardy may have been, as it seems he was, a lousy husband, but that he may have been a great poet all the same. For this defence to work, it has to be shown that Hardy’s lack of magnanimity, which did such harm in his life and the ...”

“... of historical interpretation: ‘the past is a great darkness, and filled with echoes. Voices may reach us from it; but what they say to us is imbued with the obscurity of the matrix out of which they come.’ In Alias Grace – a profoundly disconcerting story of obsession, set in Ontario in the early 19th century, and based on an actual murder case ...”

“... over this attack and made the James brothers proxies for the persecution of ex-Confederates. This may have worked, but it was opportunistic. The James Gang gained sympathy not because of their actions, or Edwards’s support of them, but because of the actions taken against them. It is this that led to the amnesty bill that was nearly passed by the Missouri ...”

“... a touch of this creative restlessness in After Hours with P.G. Wodehouse. Readers of this journal may recall a Diary by Richard Usborne (LRB, 4 October 1984) in which a determined investigation into the origins of Wodehouse’s use of ‘exquisite Tanagra figurine’ led to an evocation of the days when cut-price Boeotian ...”

“... In​ 1906, May Aldington, a writer and innkeeper, published a novel called Love-letters that Caused a Divorce. It tells the story of Kitty Yorke, who falls in love with a married man. She abandons her marriage in order to run away with her lover, but eventually, after desertion and long hardship, returns to her husband ...”

“... sex. Consider these passages from Talking to the Dead, her fourth novel. Here is Nina cooking for Richard, her lover (he also happens to be her sister’s husband), her thoughts full of sexual innuendo: We’ll eat together, in the dark, cool dining-room. I’m going to bake the salmon, very slowly, with dill and juniper berries ...   This morning I took ...”

“... There is a case for thinking that the crucial conversion was that of Edmund Burke’s father Richard, and that Burke grew up knowing that his father had publicly renounced as an ignoble superstition the Catholic religion which Edmund’s Nagle mother, and later his Nugent wife, continued to practise. O’Brien eloquently and convincingly argues that ...”