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“... as the guests were leaving the table for coffee, they spotted Rossellini, tiptoeing through the hall. He went straight to bed. Miss Bergman, desperate, tried to get him to come downstairs. ‘Tell them I didn’t come home,’ he suggested unhelpfully. She was left to return to the living-room to make impossible excuses, when suddenly the double doors were ...”

“... other little-known large paintings which were also probably made for the portego or large central hall of Venetian palaces. (In such paintings the lighting would correspond with that of the room: thus those on the wall to the left of the window overlooking the canal would be lit from the right, as is the case with the Bordone and the Schiavone.) In no earlier ...”

“... After his dismal performance at the battle of Saintes in 1242, his bitterest enemy, Simon de Montfort, said to his face: ‘It would be a good thing if you were taken and shut away, as was done to Charles the Simple. There are houses with iron bars at Windsor that would be good for imprisoning you securely.’Henry was also affectionate by nature and ...”

“... if they had played for teams that did the business every week? Much of their appeal has been to do with the uncertainty, the recklessness they seem to generate: in their opponents but also in their team-mates. In the presence of a Zola, average players tend to get above themselves. Now and then this can pay off: above themselves, they play accordingly. More ...”

“... Isabelle and their most intense memory was the arrival, at the end of the year, of the livres de prix. They hid themselves, and read every book. But though the dreaming reader persisted in Henri, he became tough and intransigent. He was sent to the Lycée Voltaire and didn’t like it, started to train for the Navy and didn’t like it, prepared for the ...”

“... I was told on New Year’s Day by a ski-mask (as opposed to a rank-and-file bandana), ‘you’d have to be in Reality.’ I was certainly in the wrong place, at Oventic rather than La Realidad, misled by assurances that I would find the local leader, Comandante David; I was stranded where not much was happening for the ...”

“... On 18 July​ 2003, the body of the weapons inspector David Kelly was found in the woods on Harrowdown Hill in Oxfordshire, two months after he’d revealed that the Blair administration had exaggerated the threat posed by Saddam Hussein. Rachel Wells, the central character in Number 11 and the narrator of the first of its five overlapping stories, was ten when Kelly’s body was discovered ...”

“... was used for so long to reinforce ideas of white European superiority, it still has the power to do this even though the era of slavery and empire is officially over, even though majority-white countries support ethnic pluralism as a concept. It drives discrimination and degradation in these countries, and serves to normalise the continuing military and ...”

“... murder is wrong – which it was, even then – but because it’s politically expedient to do so. In Sansom’s novels, affairs of state are more than stage dressing: they are the soil in which the plot grows.As Shardlake investigates, peasants tired of talk start ripping down hedges. There is news of rebel camps appearing in the Home ...”

“... offered the chance of putting Life off a little longer by staying on, as I thought vaguely ‘to do research’, though into what I had no idea. In quest of a supervisor and also a subject I paid a disastrous visit to Beryl Smalley at St Hilda’s, thinking I might do something on the Franciscans. There had been a ...”

“... altogether reasonable, but not as if it needs a special word. What the concept actually seems to do is to convert a complex bundle of morally ambiguous habits into a virtue: it is pragmatism in its best possible light. The Vicar of Bray wouldn’t have seny, nor would your ordinary malleable politician, but a slave-owning Catalan who built a handsome church ...”

“... people trying to ‘adopt’ Coe. Television viewers can see the process at work in the person of David Coleman, who maintains, on camera, what comes across as a flirtatiously bantering relationship with ‘Seb’. Coe may be inured to it by now, but as his book records, he has been embarrassed in the past: ‘To cap it all, [Frank] Bough had signed off the ...”

“... I don’t remember exactly what Relf’s involvement was in the case that I sat through. I do remember that the defendant was convicted by the jury and sentenced by a crusty old English judge to a short term of imprisonment. The judge, who one might imagine would have had little sympathy with this newfangled legislation, gave the defendant a stern ...”

“... good fortune not merely of an opposition party which chose first Foot and then Kinnock to do battle against her, but of the services of such invaluable allies as General Galtieri, Anthony Wedgwood Benn and ‘King Arthur’ Scargill? And was there anyone at Tory Central Office so absurdly optimistic as to foresee the hilarious shambles which would be ...”

“... transition plans. He didn’t know how many people worked in the White House and that they’d all have to be replaced. He neglected to call the State Department before he called Putin. Obama charmed him during their first meeting, and now he may keep some bits of Obamacare – forget all those years he spent saying the president was born in Kenya. He ...”