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“... the year before Reich arrived in the country, and ideas about liberation which fermented in Europe took on a new aspect. The American establishment (notably the Rockefeller Foundation) started off by generously funding the seeds of the sexual revolution – on the grounds that if you knew the facts you could control them – and sponsored Kinsey’s ...”

“... this with a sigh Somewhere ages and ages hence: Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, and I – I took the one less travelled by, And that has made all the difference. Teasing Thomas about his hesitations between poetry and prose becomes in retrospect a rather darker meditation on choice and its consequences for both poets. Thomas, however, felt that Frost ...”

“... camp personnel, Gestapo and police, or participants in the ‘euthanasia’ programme). No wonder John McCloy, the generally patient American High Commissioner, complained about the ‘abysmal ignorance’ displayed by many who wrote to him. Frei brings out very well the pathos that attached to incarcerated former members of the Wehrmacht, and the ...”

“... hands of the murderous and unstable emperor; they would have remembered the public rioting that took place when Nero replaced her by marrying his mistress Poppaea (whose beauty, according to one of the play’s choral odes, rivalled that of Helen of Troy; Octavia, meanwhile, is portrayed as a model of virtue, but no one mentions her appearance). They would ...”

“... first Trainspotting movie, and Irvine Welsh still cannae act to save his life. In the original, he took the part of Mikey Forrester, the Muirhouse-based purveyor of inferior opiate products, the one who sold the suppositories Mark Renton shat out in the bookies’ toilet. And he was delightful at it, smirking and giggling in his Wattie Buchan T-shirt, like the ...”

“... a cumbersome Edwardian three-seater decked out in Sanderson chintz, became my island of retreat. I took the sunniest room in the house for my study and since Raphael had no television, I rented one from Rediffusion on the Bethnal Green Road. It came on a stand and could be wheeled discreetly to one side. Draped with a dark red velvet curtain, it lent a ...”

“... unsustainable co-ordination between businesses and governments. In 1931, as global depression took hold and prices fell, the governor of Oklahoma shut down oil wells by military force, declaring that ‘the price of oil must go to $1 a barrel; now don’t ask me any more damned questions.’ Price stability grows from the barrel of a gun, not the ...”

“... five hours’. The Lodge, on 3rd Avenue between East 53rd and 54th Streets, opened in 1952. It took its cue from Shaw’s, also on 3rd, which according to one former patron, was ‘a narrow little bar that gave you the feeling you were inside a bus … You would come in the front door and the bar was full of filthy, dirty, scuzzy paraphernalia hanging from ...”

“... to read the reviews aloud. ‘It is to be hoped that she will be recognised for what she is,’ John Ashbery wrote in the New York Times, ‘one of the finest modern writers of fiction, in any language.’ He went on to describe her prose as ‘a constant miracle’ in which ‘it is impossible to deduce the end of a sentence from its beginning, or a ...”

“... the Sun. Like the Journal, it is a paper that makes up stories, manufactures interviews that never took place and perverts real incidents. Day by day during the Falklands war there unfolded in its pages the most brutal, crude and unedifying journalism to have been seen in this country in – well, let us say in the lifetime of its unlikeable editor, the ...”

“... on every door in the parish to record the names of those who lived there and their occupations. It took the jurors three full days in December 1684 to cover Chilvers Coton, logging the location of all the dwellings, which were later marked on a map. The jurors described and itemised the landscape: angled red roofs, gables and windows, the location of chimneys ...”

“... human rights record, and for the second year in a petrostate’ (the previous two conferences took place in Sharm El-Sheikh and Dubai). The UK has outsized influence in Azerbaijan, thanks mainly to BP, the country’s biggest foreign investor. In September 2023, senior BP executives travelled to Baku for the centenary of the birth of Heydar Aliyev, a ...”

“... an escapee British general, Michael Gambier-Parry, who was renowned as a forger. O’Flaherty took him to Irish parties and introduced him to senior German officers as an Irish doctor. Gambier-Parry found safe lodgings with a group of nuns, the Blue Sisters.Another figure who aided those who had to hide or escape was Prince Filippo Doria Pamphilj, who ...”

“... the Road to the Sea’, and though Mew may here be glancing hopefully at herself as an adult who took a tiny size 2 in boots, she may also be looking back at the time when she liked herself best – when she was really minute. In her essay ‘An Old Servant’ she writes with relish of a cosy and firmly administered regime in which cold baths and daily ...”

“... in part to buy time while composing the next line. (As it happens, Parry corresponded with John and Alan Lomax, who travelled around the American South recording folk musicians.) ‘The singer of tales,’ Parry later wrote, ‘has no pen and ink to let him slowly work out a novel way of recounting novel actions, but must make up his tale without ...”