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“... things – books, changed circumstances, surgery – are cures of one sort or another, for as Stephen Spender remarked in his introduction to Under the Volcano, ‘with Lowry one is never far away from the thought that although there is an illness there may also be a cure.’ They obtruded and impended like the gods in the life of a Greek, but when it ...”

“... in 1981 of a book focused on England: Patronage in the Renaissance, edited by Guy Lytle and Stephen Orgel. Taking their cue from Lytle and Orgel, F.W. Kent and Patricia Simons have turned the proceedings of a conference held in Melbourne in 1983 into a valuable volume of essays on patronage in Renaissance Italy. What is particularly interesting about ...”

“... for granted elsewhere. They order these things somewhat better in the Council of Europe, where Stephen Mennell, a disciple of Norbert Elias, began work on All Manners of Food. The slow-baked book that has finally emerged reads like a series of essays on pertinent food topics in cultural history rather than a comprehensive account of what has been ...”

“... to the benefit of all expeditions to this day.) More important, in 1988, a British climber, Stephen Venables, lived to tell of the night he spent out on his own after climbing an uncharted route by the East Face, without oxygen. The second doubt took no account of ‘summit fever’, or the effects of altitude on people’s judgment. Even before the ...”

“... 16 years as an émigré, and returned to Berlin only to clash with the East German apparatchiks. Stephen Parker’s superb biography of a great iconoclastic writer is impressively sourced, rich in detail, well-paced, highly readable yet serious. His Brecht was chastened by the dark times, but remained what his friend and stage designer Caspar Neher called ...”

“... boats can troll up to 40 miles of monofilament line strung with lightsticks to illuminate bait, small floating bobbers, bigger bobbers with radar reflectors, even special radio transmitters placed one to every eight miles of line – and thousands of large hooks. (The value of such a rig can be $20,000, Junger tells us, and sometimes a captain will endanger ...”

“... event in the official national calendar gather for a cup of tea in the Georgian town hall of a small market town in the West Midlands. There is a great deal of scarlet in evidence, in the robes of the assembled Council and of sundry invited academics, white in the vestments of the local clergy, and a respectable quantity of gold in the mayoral chains of ...”

“... eye and look at it. The camera will never know the difference.”’ Because Lorre was also rather small and chubby (though his weight fluctuated wildly), at least one film writer of the 1930s thought him Buddha-like – a ‘Buddha contemplating the mysteries and miseries of the human soul’. This is all wrong. Lorre’s eyes were far too animated: too ...”

“... four-three-three. The midfield was fortified by the addition of the Everton players Reid and Stephen to Aston Villa’s Hodge, and Hoddle was allowed enough space to fulfil his proper role of feeding the two strikers: Beardsley, a considerable improvement on Hately, and the enterprising Lineker. The result was that England played two excellent ...”

“... velocities, as well as very strong gravitational fields), quantum theory (associated with the very small), and quantum gravity (applicable only in extreme circumstances, such as those obtaining in the early universe or at the end of the life of a collapsing star). Each is associated with particular mathematical concepts, and in many ways the prime problem for ...”

“... black fellow knows how to spell his name. Then we see two slave-drivers on horseback herding a small group of shackled men across the rocks and into a forest. It’s getting cold, the men have thin blankets, their breath freezes in the air. The procession pauses when a light appears among the trees, perched on an improbable cart waving a giant tooth above ...”

“... can cut it on the platform? The two most successful conservative leaders of the Western world – Stephen Harper in Canada and Angela Merkel in Germany – are notoriously uninspiring performers behind the lectern. A recent New Yorker profile of Merkel described her delivery as so toneless it seemed as if ‘she were trying to induce her audience into ...”

“... people capture Robin Hood. He is the only figure in the DNB who is said never to have existed. Stephen Knight grants that ‘it seems highly improbable, or at least unprovable, that a Mr R. Hood ever existed,’ though, for some people, Robin Hood, King Arthur ‘and even God himself all existed because of their manifold presence in human life and ...”

“... his accommodation no more at this moment than he would in the future, he survived well enough on a small private income and some reviewing. He was not short of friends, including some as grand as T.S. Eliot, who admired Empson as well as finding him funny (‘dirtier and more distrait than ever … most refreshing to see him’). But the war was coming ...”

“... a barricade, too broken-backed to shoulder the great historical tasks assigned them? If so, men small wonder that Marx ended up turning to an ‘inhuman’ revolutionary force to reoccupy the place disappointingly vacated by a human one. Entertaining and irresistible speculations of this sort can be deeply misleading, however, especially if they distract ...”