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“... young man is working for the British Council in Blenheim Palace, and being gently patronised by John Betjeman. The sympathetic wicket wasn’t all that hard to find; indeed it might have been less yielding if the suppliant had been a lower-middle-class boy from Leeds. It must be said that some of the writing manages, by avoiding overemphasis, dimming the ...”

“... to have been the fleeting ten thousand. Nor did he fail them. Bubbling with pride, he once told John Mortimer in a Sunday Times interview about the prostitutes he had known: ‘I treated them with consideration and like a gentleman. I always let them have their pleasure first. And of course I was enough of a connoisseur to know if their pleasure was ...”

“... Schreiber’s book, was a talker too. Professor Schreiber, who teaches criminology at New York’s John Jay College of Criminal Justice, had to listen to him for six unbroken years before she could begin to write his terrible story. When the 38-year-old shoemaker from Philadelphia was finally arrested in 1975, he and his 14-year-old son Michael had murdered ...”

“... they were acquitted). The availability of legal aid and the abolition of the death penalty took much of the public interest out of murder trials, and perhaps criminal trials in general, except the most horrible, such as the Soham murders of two ten-year-old girls, or those involving well-known public figures like Thorpe. Horrible cases remain the daily ...”

“... situations, often having used his wealth to make them happen. In 1931, he was the first to publish John Betjeman, who had been a fellow student at Oxford. In 1933 he financed the final collaboration between Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill. When Salvador Dalí was nearly suffocated by the diving suit he wore to the International Surrealist Exhibition in London in ...”

“... a couple of years ago) I worked out the kettle was sucking in about three kilowatts of power. It took a minute to boil. The firm that sells us our electricity, Octopus, changes its tariffs every half-hour according to the price set at the auctions where it and other buyers bid for electricity from the companies that generate it. It was just before 11 ...”

“... you out of this fantasy is the first line of dialogue, delivered matter-of-factly by the farmer, John, to his wife: ‘Mary? I’ll ask you again. How many times did you come?’ This isn’t your average farm but a site of adultery, fecklessness, vice. This is a Kevin Barry short story because it could only be a Kevin Barry short story. There Are Little ...”

“... grows larger, as you leave the other buildings behind. Every few levels of scaffolding, pigeons took off. Battersea doesn’t look like a skyscraper, but it’s more than a hundred metres high. You come out at the top by pulling up over a ridge of bricks and scaffolding onto an expanse of grey slate, big as an empty town square, between two of the great ...”

“... particularly well in a series of drawings of the Madonna and Child, sometimes with the infant St John, made in the preparation of some of his best-known pictures, in which the children are endowed with an agility and poise quite incongruous for their supposed age but perhaps justifiable on the grounds of their divine status. It was in Rome, where Raphael ...”

“... Now this is finally a category that makes sense to me. No wonder her titles so often remind me of John Ashbery’s. (He said that music was an even greater influence on him than visual art.) Williams’s titles are invitational or introductory, not explanatory: ‘Head of a Naked Girl’; ‘What a Great Man Learned about Reflection and ...”

“... Reagan and nominate plain-spoken originalists like Antonin Scalia and Robert Bork. Instead, he took the path described in my previous essay,* and tendered stealth nominees whose public records provided few clues as to future performance. Not that this administration was equally in the dark. During the 1980s, both ...”

“... their movies in parking lots or off of trucks until they are chased away by the police. The critic John Anderson who has written a book about Sundance calls it ‘a progressive event that recognises the right of every American to get her or his movie on-screen.’ And yet, as Andy Klein, another journalist, complains, Sundance is ‘about as useful’ for ...”

“... Edgar Hoover, Castro, Khrushchev, Howard Hunt, Earl Warren, George H.W. Bush, Duong Van Minh, the John Birch Society, the Freemasons or Aristotle Onassis. ‘I am not a conspiracy theorist,’ he begins. ‘I am a conspiracy empiricist.’ He wants to know the truth because without it ‘another president could once more be cut down in his or her ...”

“... I face More of the epic would be discovered under the sand as time went on. In 1990 Stephanie Dalley added more lines to her edition from newly recovered pieces, but most of what’s left has probably been smashed in the course of the Iraq wars. It seems proper that a place of fire and dust, its skin scarred by warfare, should be the origin of the story of the Flood today: devastation in negative, flood and drought bound together ...”

“... But most simply disappeared from my life, as if they meant no more to me than the person who took my toll on the Bay Bridge. Mike Rogin was among those who disappeared. Having burned my bridges, I had no occasion or desire to return to my old haunts, and our paths never crossed professionally. So though we had once been friends, good friends, years ...”