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“... stage of her adult life: they also provide a running commentary on her times. She is a witness to George III’s derangement in 1788, sequestered with him and the Queen in the Palace at Kew. She attends the trial of Warren Hastings. She experiences the Napoleonic regime first-hand during an enforced stay in France between 1803 and 1812. In her teens and ...”

“... Open City starts firmly anchored in time and place: ‘From the intersection of 172nd Street, the George Washington Bridge came into view for the first time, its lights soft yellow points in the grey distance. I walked past small shops selling knickknacks, the sprawling window displays of El Mundo Department Store, and the perpetually popular restaurant El ...”

“... Yet BSkyB, which had outbid ITV for exclusive live television rights, proclaimed it ‘A Whole New Ball Game’ on its billboards. In 1994 came the landmark signing of a foreign superstar, the German World Cup winning striker Jürgen Klinsmann, by Spurs. The following year Arsenal bought Holland’s Dennis Bergkamp, and Middlesbrough, of all places, recruited ...”

“... SO15 counterterrorism unit. Some of the stories obtained this way were trivial, though intrusive: George Michael wept in his jail cell, for example, or a male British Airways worker secretly wore high heels. Others were more serious: security lapses at Heathrow, or equipment shortages in Afghanistan. Almost anything could be obtained if the offer was big ...”

“... you hold the line if we fail?’ ‘Yes,’ the GOC replied, ‘provided I can use ball’ – live ammunition. ‘In the light of that,’ the chief constable replied, ‘the position is untenable.’ But had the march not gone down the Garvaghy Road, Trimble would have been destroyed, and with him any prospect of an inclusive settlement. The ...”

“... low haunts? Unfortunately, the most frequently attributed notebooks in the new atlas are those of George Duckworth. Duckworth is now chiefly remembered as the half-brother who regularly molested Virginia Woolf and was pilloried in her memoirs as a ‘man of pure convention’. From 1892 to 1902 he was Charles Booth’s unpaid private secretary and in his ...”

“... choice and in its way a momentous one. Had Her Majesty gone for another duff read, an early George Eliot, say, or a late Henry James, novice reader that she was she might have been put off reading for good and there would be no story to tell. Books, she would have thought, were work. As it was, with this one she soon became engrossed and, passing her ...”

“... life. Becoming a successful barrister, say, is not like running a hundred metres or kicking a ball into a net. What is a ‘fair’ advantage? Being confident and being able to speak clearly may be helpful qualifications for a barrister who has to lead in a crowded court, but we have to ask where these capacities come from, who is likely to have them, and ...”

“... go back to England: according to Ida, Mansfield ‘had written of something that had happened at a ball when she had sat out one of the dances with her partner, and which her mother discovered. In her usual fashion, Katherine had embellished the facts when writing them down, and her parents, taking them seriously, not unnaturally thought twice about letting ...”

“... iced over, well-nigh irrecoverably. Earth was prevented from becoming a permanently lifeless ball of ice only through processes which are not fully understood. This is known, with appropriate chillingness, as the ‘snowball earth event’. Most of the variation in the earth’s climatic cycles comes from small irregularities in its orbit. These ...”

“... Tom Hopkinson, the palaver over Silas Glossop, the father of her children, her affairs with George Barker, David Gascoyne, Eric Siepmann, Ronald Moody, Basil Nicholson, Ian Henderson ... And she could never write about the incident following her release from the asylum, when she was visited in her bedroom by a man with a mutilated leg, wearing her ...”

“... Did it have any wider meaning? Was it an aberration? On 17 April 1855, Queen Victoria held a ball at Windsor Castle to celebrate the state visit of Napoleon III. Its location was the magnificent Waterloo Chamber, a symbol of Britain’s global ascendancy. If Napoleon III, nephew of the original, minded dancing with ...”

“... been incorporated into the triumphalist narrative. The reductio ad absurdum of this process was George W. Bush’s speech in the summer of 2003, on Gorée Island off the coast of Senegal – a notorious depot in the slave trade. By resisting injustice, Bush announced, ‘the very people traded into slavery helped to set America free.’ Even the traffic in ...”

“... putting the reader inside the heads of both characters as well as his own, as if the ball is being tossed from Anna to Vronsky to the narrator at high speed without ever being dropped, is one of the supreme moments of craft in all fiction, and evidence that Tolstoy was quite capable of imagining what his wife was feeling at any moment, had he ...”

“... way Balzac’s 30-year-old coquette would sit, on a chair stuffed with down, after an exhausting ball … His skin had a sort of feminine delicacy to it; he had blond hair, wavy in nature, which outlined his pale, noble brow so picturesquely … However blond his hair was, his whiskers and eyebrows were black – the mark of breeding in a person … To ...”