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“... that Darling seems most alive. ‘When Darling entered a room, men stood,’ the playwright Robert Patrick said. ‘They instinctively stood in the presence of the goddess. Before she opened her mouth and started the Candy craziness, she projected a real movie star effect. Aristocratic. Ladylike.’ It would be naive to think that a woman who spent time at the ...”

“... rally than you see at meetings held by the established political parties. Almost all of them were white and looked like they came from Paris’s posher areas. They were not the progeny of the gilets jaunes or working-class Le Pen voters in the dying mill towns of northern France. Many of them would have received their political baptism in La Manif pour ...”

“... appearing as a peevish young icon slouched on a chair with a moody, come-hither expression, a pure white cat on his lap and his bare feet submerged in the pile of a white rug in Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy, the portrait by David Hockney that aspired to Gainsborough as a take on the aristocracy of London, c.1971, but owed more ...”

“... triumphant. It describes how wealthy twin sisters from Ayrshire, blue-stockings who in fact wore white stockings, travelled to St Catherine’s Monastery in Sinai and discovered an early version of the Gospels, which was being used, a page at a time, to serve pats of butter. Not every well-bred Scots lady can identify a greasy Syriac palimpsest at ...”

“... of the fall of Singapore, and his consequent determination to restore the authority of the white man in the Far East, are never properly explained. Nor is there much of Churchill’s twists and turns on the Palestine question, and his alienation, after the assassination of Lord Moyne by the Stern Gang, from the Zionist cause. As a biographer ...”

“... is also a jumper in, a superb starter. What about the opening of The Hind and the Panther? A Milk white Hind, immortal and unchang’d, Fed on the lawns and in the forest rang’d. Or of Absalom and Achitophel? In pious times, ere priestcraft did begin, Before polygamy was made a sin, When man on many multiplied his kind, Ere one to one was cursedly ...”

“... the trial that I wonder whether it can answer all the questions it raises.17 September 2021. Patrick Bourbotte, a bald policeman who investigated the Bataclan attack, asks for permission to show emotion occasionally during his testimony.When we went inside, he says, the atmosphere was striking, gloomy. It looked like a cathedral. The bodies were ...”

“... was open-minded about new inventions, prepared to back them even if they had no naval relevance. Patrick Wright’s fascinating book is a cultural rather than a military history, dwelling on images and impressions of the tank, its impact on the general public, the responses of artists and writers, rather than its evolving strategic role and its ...”

“... that I could need £100. I’d go down there and he still wouldn’t pay me, and yet he’d have a white Rolls Royce with a chauffeur sitting outside waiting to take him wherever he wanted to go. But who says he paid the chauffeur? Not settling debts is hardly unheard of in Old Etonians. But Robert was a first-generation Etonian, and might conceivably have ...”

“... invoke the Pan-Africanist model.In 2021, the Côte d’Ivoire journalist Gauz – real name Armand Patrick Gbaka-Brédé – announced in Jeune Afrique that Pan-Africanism had become a relic. Pan-Africanism, in his view, had always been a gentleman’s club. Search in vain, he wrote, for women of note, or women at all. But what of the Canadian suffragist Anna ...”

“... those eyes’ on film, Brand writes: ‘she knew that if she had the patience,/to avoid killing a white man/that I would see this photograph’. She reaches out from the portrait across the decades to Brand, bequeathing ‘her will, her meticulous account, her eyes’. Prater meets the gaze of a woman still grappling with her childhood inscription in colonial ...”

“... for some while now to admit to being bored by the huge, flat, ‘pure’ abstracts on the white walls of the museums of modern art. And yet non-representational paintings on a fairly large scale seem still to be what art students are most encouraged to make. Critics now incline to applaud in them evidence of a strenously physical relationship with ...”

“... were as real to him as Joan of Arc’s voices, Blake’s angels or Elwood P. Dowd’s giant white rabbit, Harvey. Trollope’s obsession about his characters originates in the kind of trauma that classically deranges sensitive minds. His wretchedness as a schoolboy is famous from the extended descriptions of it in An Autobiography. He uses terms like ...”

“... The Cordon Bleu to the War is gone,     In the ranks of death you’ll find him. His snow-white apron is girded on     And his magic stove behind him. ‘Army beef,’ says the Cordon Bleu,     ‘Though a stupid bungler slays thee, One skilful hand thy steaks shall stew,     One artist’s pan shall braise thee.’ (That field ...”

“... must be another of nature’s old con tricks. Another writer McGahern brings to mind is the poet Patrick Kavanagh. McGahern’s story ‘Bank Holiday’, despite its curious but endearing earnestness (‘I find myself falling increasingly into an unattractive puzzlement,’ the chief character says, ‘mulling over that old, useless chestnut What is ...”