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“... Wildly excited at the thought that the Boers might at last have created the vital crack in the wall of the British Empire, Nicholas rushed off to see the Kaiser – ‘I intend to set the Emperor on the British, reminding him of his famous telegram to Kruger!’ – while the Russian Foreign Minister tried to interest the French in an anti-British ...”

“... Nazi Germany by Hitler’s Armaments Minister. After a few minutes spent considering this Berlin Wall of travellers’ dulce et utile, one would hardly be surprised to find a comic book of the filmscript of Syberberg’s Hitler, or a bag of (used) truncheons for sale. Once ensconced in the plane, a smiling hostess hands one a copy of Esquire for April ...”

“... in a semi-detached house, which will allow the neighbours to hear suspicious sounds through the wall. He should be either chairman of the local Conservative Party branch, or a leading Nonconformist and strong Temperance advocate. He should go astray through cherishing a guilty passion for his secretary or the wife of a rival professional man, and should ...”

“... of the fashion industry.Newspaper fashion supplements such as T at the New York Times, WSJ at the Wall Street Journal and the bluntly named How to Spend It (recently rebranded HTSI) at the Financial Times leverage older, affluent readers for what print advertising remains. (They are also a safe space for advertisers: imagine spending thousands of dollars to ...”

“... as well as sounds: clunk, sizzle, hiss. These are the background elements that would persist. In Helena, Montana she learned to read. ‘I believed that Understood Betsy had been written especially for me, that somewhere there was a person who wanted to tell me about her.’ Dates would be helpful here, there, anywhere, but the lack of them adds to the ...”

“... holds no surprises for the writer. ‘He sat there pale, pondering his own tale. I said, “Helena was still alive, eh?” ’ These old tricks of suspense are still there, but they take a gentler role, so that the more numinous qualities of what is narrated can be dwelt on. It is nice to know how we travel through the story – to see the automobile ...”

“... River Arno. She is about the same age as Lucy Honeychurch and she even has the same duvet cover as Helena Bonham-Carter, who plays Lucy in the film – greater identifications have been built on less. At any rate she feels just as trapped, or rather more trapped, because (unlike Lucy) she is all too aware of what’s at stake. She has Lucy to help her ...”

“... response: targeted assassinations simply provoke further retaliation (and Israel’s security wall is already proving incapable of deterring attacks). The horror it inspires cannot, however, be explained in terms of the deliberate targeting of civilians: according to McNamara, 100,000 people were burnt to death at the end of the war in the Allied attack ...”

“... comedies each feature one of the dramatist’s only three visibly pregnant women, Julietta and Helena (the third is Hermione in The Winter’s Tale). Even the unseen Mistress Elbow, in the hysterically funny non-account of events in the Bunch of Grapes, is said by Pompey Bum to be ‘with childe, and . . . great bellied, and longing (as I said) for ...”

“... a disappointment, just huge hunks of stone which could be gateposts from the end of any dry-stone wall, and I imagine that is where other similar tombstones have ended up. Much more interesting is the lychgate (restored c.1989): a single broad gate, attached by a bar and chain to an ancient pulley in the thickness of the ...”

“... some in a glass scenting the whole room, with its collection of keys hung on the plain plaster wall, the bleached oak, the Thirties paintings and bits of brocade. But as one came in, the last smell was always the fish that was put out in the vestibule for the cats. We settled on the royal retinue of Richard II 1388-99 as my research subject and there-after ...”

“... and she stared quietly back. A crowd of light: in A Midsummer Night’s Dream Lysander says that Helena engilds the night more ‘than all yon fiery oes and eyes of light’. Gillian Clarke’s phrase removes the gasping hyperbole and domesticates the particles. In ‘Sheep’s Skulls’ the sheep die On the open hill, and raven and buzzard Come like women ...”

“... not answer my calls. Finally he was found, seated gloomily by himself in the closet facing the wall. He was punishing himself. We later found a smallish puddle of vomit in the conservatory. No one had ever before punished him for his attacks of gastritis, naturally; it was all his own idea, his peculiar Bostonian sense of guilt. And what was Elizabeth ...”

“... shelf. The buttocks and thighs of a muscular plaster torso, its front primly turned to face the wall, loom over the women below.By the 1820s, ateliers specialising in female tutelage were a fixture of the Paris art world. At least thirty female artists made their debut at the Louvre’s Salon between 1822 and 1827; in 1824, 101 female exhibitors showed a ...”

“... shape before the novelist’s eyes, as a kind of hallucination; whether, when he looked at a wall, a tree or a face, he subsequently had absolute, or only partial, recall of it; and whether the musings and images that entered his head while dozing before a fire, or just before going to sleep, were comparable in nature or intensity to the novelist’s ...”