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“... to escape was Shakespearean theatre. Although the British military authorities who took over the John Street theatre in New York during the hostilities must have wondered whether the productions of Richard III, King Lear, The Taming of the Shrew and Macbeth that they staged there between 1777 and 1783 were the last performances of Shakespeare or of anything ...”

“... in an unknown hospital. The nurses’ hands, the vibrations caused by people walking around the ward, the pain of the sheets against his wounds are his only contact with the outside world. He is unable to separate the present from his hallucinations of the past: work and love in Los Angeles, his upbringing in Colorado. Trumbo cleverly writes the reader into ...”

“... much further, but calling her ‘the best angry woman writer ever’ – the camp-trash director John Waters’s jokey blurb – carries much the same order of insight as Jacqueline Susann saying, post-Portnoy, that she’d like to meet Roth but wouldn’t want to shake his hand. Elena Greco, the heroine of Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay, shares quite a ...”

“... indirect style – though McEwan makes less use than Bellow of interior monologue – and, like John Updike’s ‘Rabbit’ books, in the present tense. There’s also an allusion to Joyce’s ‘The Dead’ in the novel’s closing sentence (as McEwan pointed out in an interview on Radio 4), and the influence of Ulysses makes itself felt in several ways ...”

“... Even then, Caroline was as brazen as ever. The fashionable world was not charitable, wrote J.W. Ward, a friend of Byron’s in Portugal who eventually became foreign secretary, ‘the public scandal is infinite.’ ‘By the common consent of all London’, Byron’s close friend John Cam Hobhouse said, Caroline had ...”

“... off in September 2014 – the name comes from the fact that protesters used raised umbrellas to ward off tear gas. The protests drew almost no attention in mainland China, thanks to the blocking of news and messages from Hong Kong, and also thanks to the systematic use of counter-propaganda by a new ‘fifty-cent army’ of paid bloggers, trolls and ...”

“... was to be socially as well as musically discordant; it is no accident that the primary business of John Stark, publisher of Scott Joplin’s most famous rags, was the selling of pianos. The arrival of the cheap domestic piano hastened the decline of field songs and ‘spirituals’ among former slaves, but by and large failed to establish a pious white ...”

“... of the humiliation of some over-mighty cabinet colleague – Geoffrey Howe, say, or Jim Prior or John Moore or Francis Pym – I could picture the scene only too well:I can do no better at this stage than describe my own punishment chamber, which I call the Lady Chapel.   This is not blasphemy on my part. It is a chapel to the Lady (the Lady I serve) in ...”

“... wildly as they hunted and hid and ducked and dodged invisible monsters. It was like watching a ward full of alcoholics in simultaneous delirium. Overhead monitors showed us each player’s separate delusional view of the world, a treeless landscape of lumpy hills and squat smooth-walled buildings in which crude cartoon robot-creatures prowled. This is the ...”

“... bullets and if they come for me I am going to open fire.’ It is strange to hear George Bush and John Reid deny that a civil war is going on, given that so many bodies – all strangled, shot or hanged solely because of their religious allegiance – are being discovered every day. Car bombs exploded in the markets in the great Shia slum of Sadr City in ...”

“... poetry, neither of which he knows anything about. He suffers anxiety attacks, pops pills, reads John Ashbery and sits in the park, where he fails to work. As in a video game, it’s not exactly what happens that counts: what’s important is how deeply you’re drawn into the world of the game, how transfixed you become. Adam is drawn deeply into his new ...”

“... happened was another. (It proved to be a lengthy and difficult business for the military historian John Kaye, who died in 1876 before completing his still standard History of the Sepoy War in India: in three volumes he had taken the narrative only to the end of 1857. More recently, Andrew Ward’s moving account of the ...”

“... conceal these links. It even instructed Crown forensic scientists – as one was to testify to Sir John May – to alter their statements to remove reference to the evidence which connected the Guildford and Woolwich offences to the other crimes. At the unsuccessful appeal of the Guildford Four in 1977, the Court of Appeal was content to accept the truth of ...”

“... In​ 1993 the soothsayer John Major advised that fifty years hence Britain ‘will still be the country of long shadows on county grounds, warm beer, invincible green suburbs, dog lovers and pools fillers’. Still? That suggests these properties were extant in 1993. And maybe they were, somewhere. The optimist premier equated country with county, with his native patch, Surrey, where the past is never dead but constantly honoured in reproductions of varying degrees of happy bogusness ...”

“... values. It is at this moment that the cute fables, the family vignettes and the ghastly Janet-and-John style hit the real world with a thud. Britain under Thatcher gave the world privatisation. Blair is attracting equal international interest by taking the dissolution of communal wealth on to the next stage. New Labour is handing assets to corporate Britain ...”