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“... was time to internationalise himself. He learned enough Danish, Latin, English, Russian, German, French and Italian to read or get by in, and in most cases rather more. By turns, he put himself through Brandes and Tolstoy; Dostoevsky and Strindberg; Tagore; Bourget and Proust; Freud, Jung and Adler; Joyce and Hemingway. ‘If there was one 20th-century ...”

“... and documentary evidence: a triumph of rubber and tweed underpinned by collegiate spirit and, as Patrick O’Brian wrote in the LRB, ‘that fine zeal and conviction which arises from original research’. It might have been called definitive, but, as this superb new edition reminds us, history never sleeps, and nor does the sea. Evidence from the shifting ...”

“... scroll of recorded events: Rostov’s fractional pause and subsequent guilt because his French opponent has a dimple in his chin; ‘one bandy-legged old French officer, wearing Hessian boots, who was getting up the hill with difficulty, taking hold of bushes’. These details are more memorable than the names of ...”

“... to English readers which made him one of the notable translators of poetry in his time. He knew French well, though I remember his accent was even worse than my own, and his translations from that language were largely a labour of love, for his own verse had been influenced by French poets and particularly by Pierre ...”

“... in a book rendered appallingly poignant by her premature death this year, the brilliant young French medical historian Roselyne Rey observes that pain always was and still remains a poor relation in the medical mansion. Suffering, the Church had ruled, was the lot of sinners; so like the poor, pain would always be with us – which made it easy for ...”

“... nationalist cause. The Prendergasts came from Cork, at some point migrating to Dublin slumland. Patrick, my grandfather, married Mary Leonard. Her mother, Granny Leonard, I saw once, at a very great age, wizened and swaddled in a large armchair, surrounded by clan members. She was very small and a republican firebrand. During the uprising, she would ...”

“... age of seventeen and a half, but the internal backbiting continues. The current team coach, Patrick Kiens, was brought in from the Netherlands, which many Romanians involved in gymnastics seem to find insulting. Some gymnasts have refused to be coached by ‘the Dutch’, and in the mixed zone at the world championships last year, Ana ...”

“... David Wright, ‘a literary instrument of precision’, and a long-time friend and supporter; Patrick Kavanagh, who was to be approached ‘with a large whisky in one’s outstretched hand’; George Barker, first seen ‘wearing a check suit and cap, all very new, as if in the course of an attempt to prove that he was not a poet but a bookmaker’. But ...”

“... Revival’ is the title of one important section of the book, containing essays by Patrick Minford, Martin Holmes and John Redwood. Minford recapitulates an already familiar analysis of the three parts of Thatcher’s economic programme, ‘the conquest of inflation, the promotion of efficiency, and the defeat of unemployment’, which were ...”

“... Hitler’s obscure relatives, his half-brother Alois’s Irish wife Bridget and their son William Patrick Hitler, who for a time lived in Liverpool. The book is ‘edited’ and introduced by Michael Unger of the Liverpool Daily Post, who describes the discovery of the heavily ghost-written manuscript in New York Public Library. This is a sub-genre of ...”

“... not a symptom, of nostalgia, and his view of the English past has something in common with Patrick Wright’s illuminating analysis in On Living in an Old Country. Of course, the polished images of the surface are still there. Hill’s poetry would be blander if the acknowledgment of barbarism were not accompanied by powerful celebrations of the ...”

“... the Class War leader writers lean more towards the Beano or Dandy than the tiresome headbutting of French art guerrillas. ‘Bash the Toffs.’ ‘Let your goat into their prize rose garden.’ ‘Kidnap their snotty kids.’ The stratagems are familiar to anyone brought up on the antics of Lord Snooty and his pals, while the topics under discussion rarely ...”

“... the introduction of the Listerian method.’ It was the same across Europe: Scottish, Danish and French as well as German hospitals became less dangerous. But carbolic was not safe. It was absorbed through the skin and poisoned patients and surgeons, causing kidney damage (black urine was a tell-tale symptom). And laboratory tests showed that it was much ...”

“... daughter, Sally, died suddenly of polio, in Java, where she had been living with her husband, Patrick Kavanagh. Just as Lehmann had at first faced the loss of Day-Lewis with disbelief, so she refused to accept Sally’s death, taking refuge this time in spiritualism. She became convinced that she was regularly in contact with her daughter. Her friend and ...”

“... sexuality to an encounter group for unhappy smalltown housewives. (One of them recalls that ‘the French like black people, or might be black themselves – she wasn’t sure.’) She writes knowingly about voucher-based efforts to keep school segregation in place, and about the ideological formation that the authorities wish to foster in talented black ...”