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“... In 2006 the Wall Street Journal declared Qiu Xiaolong’s first novel, Death of a Red Heroine (2000), one of the top five ‘political novels’ of all time for its indictment of Communism. Many of the crimes in his books have their roots in the repression of the past, but Qiu’s series about Chief Inspector Chen Cao – after Death of a Red Heroine came A Loyal Character Dancer (2002), When Red Is Black (2004), A Case of Two Cities (2006) and now Red Mandarin Dress – is actually less concerned with politics than with the contrast between victims and perpetrators ...”

“... is an allegory of other-womanhood. In 1933, three years before she exhibited Ma Gouvernante at her first solo show, Oppenheim began an affair with Max Ernst. She was 20, studying art in Paris; he was 44. His wife, the painter Marie-Berthe Aurenche, was 29. The shoes were Aurenche’s, a second-hand gift from Ernst to Oppenheim, who bound and plated them. After ...”

“... hearts, pumping away like so many little speedboat engines, her glamorous feats were kept alive. I first read about her in a ragged back number of the Ladder, the pioneering lesbian magazine published privately in the United States in the Fifties and Sixties. There, in a breathless profile (‘Her Own Private World’), she was described as ‘possibly the ...”

“... censure. Over the years he has written prodigiously about the customs, beliefs and writings of first-century Jews, and has more than once studied Jesus against that background, using material to which only great learning can have full access. He is perhaps best known as an authority on the Dead Sea Scrolls, though they hardly figure at all in this ...”

“... and – in the light of new evidence – to reinterpret his memories of him, but also for the first time to understand what their unarticulated feelings about each other actually were. To Geoffrey, and to us, criminal justice gives way to familial understanding. Such a conclusion might seem to tilt the book decisively towards the novel proper, but – and ...”

“... to move beyond itself. Sam’s Wellerisms in The Pickwick Papers, Sally’s tangled maxims in Ruth, or Yellowplush’s verbal aberrations in The Yellowplush Papers are all more than a comic undertow: they provide another way of seeing the motivation and action of the dominant characters. In part, such unlettered characters are the object of authorial ...”

“... in the list – perhaps there’s a nostalgia for the old Empire (Scott, J.G. Farrell, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, plus Nadine Gordimer, Naipaul, and P.H. Newby on Suez). Negatively, you won’t expect, and won’t find, anything that looks very ‘experimental’. Muriel Spark must have come up again and again, sometimes against what, looking at the ...”

“... inquisitions and forced Catholicism.’ He had been derisive about and fearful of the short-lived first Labour government under Ramsay MacDonald in 1924, when there was ‘no quadrille d’honneur’ at the Court Ball – ‘probably it was feared the socialist ministers and their wives would be too clumsy.’ Those ministers were let off wearing knee ...”

“... editor and translator of Brecht, Ronald Hayman’s a lively, detailed biography – though the first turns out to be far the more expert, original and reliable. Indeed, Brecht in Context, economical, witty and unpretentious in a way that Brecht would have liked, but immensely well-informed and thoroughly documented, seems certain to become required reading ...”

“... the fragment is c.125, making it the earliest surviving witness to the New Testament. It was the first time Kristeva had seen the fragment and perhaps the tenth time I had, but I doubt that our sense of wonder was any different. There, in its portable transparent box, was the earliest relic of the Book. In Christopher de Hamel’s history, the Rylands ...”

“... have got at the time. The problem, nonetheless, is that this is the last of five volumes, the first four of which were published during the last episode but one in the continuing struggle for the soul of the Labour Party. Benn has been struggling for the soul of the Party almost since he joined it, and dictating his own version of events into the little ...”

“... are people, from Aalto to Zuckermann, taking in Fidel Castro, Elizabeth David, Erskine Childers, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, Robert Byron, Lawrence Durrell, Le Corbusier, Malcolm MacDonald, Tambimuttu ... and Donald Maclean. It is completely typical of the whole book that Maclean (whom he knew at school at Gresham’s) is characterised solely by the ...”

“... ball hard at a runner in order to get him out of the game, usually on a blooded stretcher. ‘The first professional English cricket team that came to this country used to practise near us, and they used to come over and watch our game occasionally,’ reads one 19th-century account of the transatlantic battle between England’s haughty Essex men and ...”

“... is a perfect sunbeam to Father,’ her mother remarked. Yet while her father took the family first to Europe, then from country to country, in search of the right atmosphere and the right school for her brothers, Alice merely sat at home, learning a bit of this and that, partaking of the atmosphere. Her father took pleasure in her intelligence but did ...”

“... in the disaster of the election-that-never-was, it is still this group that Brown turns to first (by all accounts, first thing in the morning) for guidance, reassurance and schemes of revenge. It means that Brown has become dependent on the advice of people who were once entirely dependent on him. This cannot be ...”