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“... he wrote to his wife. So much for that famous peaceableness.) More serious exponents were Paul Claudel, poet and diplomat (Shanghai, he wrote in 1896, was ‘an industrious honeycomb communicating in all its parts, perforated like an ant-hill’), and Victor Segalen, poet, novelist and physician, who travelled in ...”

“... he and Guppy discussed during that conversation, including their military heroes. And suddenly, Paul Merton interjects with the line: ‘Hence Major Goof that you mentioned just now.’It’s a lovely joke, which gets a terrific laugh and a round of applause. But its effect on the exchange is noticeable. An uncomfortable situation is suddenly ...”

“... going to ring a bit hollow to anyone who likes these other series, glossy as they are, or thinks Hill Street Blues and LA Law are among the best things American television has ever done. I don’t really doubt the authenticity of The Wire, its proliferation of unpulled punches, but it isn’t good because it’s authentic, it looks authentic because it’s ...”

“... The Seven Per Cent Solution. Many American and British novelists, from Truman Capote to Piers Paul Read, have taken on the non-fiction thriller. But the benefits of fictional devices to serious non-fiction, from the days of André Maurois’s romanticised version of Shelley to Norman Mailer’s pastiche of Marilyn Monroe, have seemed more dubious. With ...”

“... jokes about Clinton are always the same joke. ‘When he comes to a fork in the road,’ writes Paul Greenberg of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, ‘he takes it.’ He wants to have his dozen Big Macs and eat them too. And so forth. (I myself have contributed a one-liner: ‘Why did Bill Clinton cross the road? Because he wanted to get to the middle.’) In ...”

“... at the bedroom window! The tattered rendition of the Last Post, by a pair of insect-buglers on the hill opposite, didn’t help. A prayer was said; the bouquets deposited; the tremors persisted. I had yet to see any Night of the Living Dead movies at this point; but when I did, back in San Diego a few years later, alone in the cheerless TV ‘den’ of the ...”

“... on apparently dry subjects such as ‘The Shelving and Classification of Printed Books’ (F.J. Hill) or ‘The Acquisitions Policies and Funding of the Department of Printed Books, 1837 – 1959’ (Ilse Sternberg) prove to be extraordinarily illuminating. Paul Cross offers (at last) an authoritative inside history of ...”

“... soda.’) One thinks immediately of Sylvia Plath in her small kitchen, one floor up in Primrose Hill. The last time her husband saw her there, he said, she was ‘upset and crying … tidying the place up’. By the 1980s, our house was full of stuff. Coats in the cupboards, toys in the attic, half-drunk bottles of whisky from Hogmanay. There was so much ...”

“... Kircher, as well as Constantine and St Eustachius. Pilgrims and walkers still climb the hill to see the church, enjoy its splendid views and buy mugs with Kircher’s picture on them. Yet Kircher went wrong on almost every point of fact, and some of his mistakes may not have been innocent. The marble tablet that first informed him he had made a ...”

“... the square, indeed she scarcely seems to have known where it was: ‘One side is chimneys on a hill, I suppose Islington.’ Three months after she moved in she reported ‘a chamber pot in the sitting room and a bed in the dining room’. Her spell there was brief – from August 1939 to October 1940 – and fractured by war. ‘Everybody is feeling the ...”

“... tablet which Sir Frances Drake erected on the coast of California, where it emerged from a sand hill. The specific metal alloy was not in use in the 16th century. The proof was superfluous. Where Drake’s memorial would have written ‘for ever’ the tablet has ‘forever’. Similarly, later grammatical forms on the Minnesota stone. A single word may ...”

“... music. One of these venues – on the rue Huchette – called itself La Discothèque. Then Paul Pacine opened the Whiskey a Go-Go, where dancers would hit the floor accompanied by records played by disc jockeys on a phonograph. Pacine went on to open other clubs in Europe, while in Paris Chez Régine opened in 1960, catering to the self-styled ...”

“... contain nearly a hundred thousand pages of manuscript material. The vast Collected Poems edited by Paul Keegan and published in 2003 presents a poet who insistently ‘o’erflows the measure’, to borrow a phrase from Antony and Cleopatra, veering, rather like Shakespeare’s Antony, between the sublime and the bathetic, the uncannily sure-footed and the ...”

“... to pee.” The previous week I went to see my daughter in Brooklyn and I couldn’t make it up the hill and had to stop in a telephone kiosk to pee. “Oh, that’s happened to me,” Roth said. “I’ve done the kiosk thing.” “Well, Phil,” I said. “You always were precocious.”’ We spoke about London. We’d met there once upon a time, at the ...”