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“... covered Europe with graves, ashes and tears.’ Appropriately, The Battle won the Prix Goncourt. Max Gallo’s million-selling quartet of novels, by contrast, gleefully embraces the myth of the ‘grand homme’ in its most lurid, overblown form. If Rambaud displaces the focus from Napoleon to the ordinary men and women drowning in his wake, Gallo places the ...”

“... experiment towards broad metaphysical conceptions’. On the other hand, when the Nazis dismissed Max Born, the pioneer of quantum mechanics, from his chair of theoretical physics at Göttingen, Rutherford immediately moved heaven and earth to find him support, a niche to work in at the Cavendish Laboratory and a house in Cambridge. Rutherford disapproved of ...”

“... discussion of dissolving Kell’s department. Helm’s case, along with the subsequent trials of Max Schultz and Armgaard Karl Graves, were also sufficient to secure a remarkable restriction of British civil liberties. In 1911 Churchill, then home secretary, began issuing general warrants to examine the entire correspondence of particular suspects ...”

“...  6 January. The alterations we have been having done are now pretty much finished, thanks to Max, a young Latvian who’s unsmiling but an excellent carpenter and Eugene, much jollier and from New Zealand who has supervised it all. Walking round the job this evening R. is shocked to discover in the bathroom above the bath a crudely made wooden cross ...”

“... everybody said she was the most disagreeable-looking child ever seen. It was true, too.The night Max wore his wolf suit and made mischief of one kind and another his mother called him ‘Wild thing!’ and Max said ‘I’ll eat you up!’ so he was sent to bed without eating anything.Alice was beginning to get very tired ...”

“... interesting. But the journey over proved the final straw, since Lieutenant James drank too much porter and snored. When, in Calcutta, he abandoned her for another woman, ending the marriage, it seems to have been a relief. Mrs James returned home to England with $10,000 in her pocket, some from her husband and some from her stepfather. On the boat home, she ...”

“... grotesquely alive, but it amounted to the same thing. I was in debt, and my childhood friend Max Thurlow offered to help. He is now a successful, what you might call intellectually deluxe columnist at the Times – the type who mentions Tacitus or Mill every other week – and knew that the newspaper prepared its major obituaries in advance of the ...”

“... cage Waugh would not rattle. Sometimes it was just for fun. He could be, as his former colleague Max Hastings put it, ‘manically mischievous’. At others he would make a point with Swiftian savagery, as in July 1977 when the Gay News trial came to court. Mary Whitehouse, the campaigner against the ‘permissive society’, had brought a private ...”

“... to pull) – wasn’t rooted in the hostility towards women that seethes through the play. Jimmy Porter may rail against society, boring Sundays and the general peeling-wallpaper crappiness of postwar England, but it’s women who bear the brunt of his hyperarticulate, inchoate tantrums, women who embody and enforce the stultification of life; in ...”

“... other. Lanzer’s story involves scribbled messages, missed trains, timetables, a postmistress, a porter, a waiter, a long-suffering friend in Vienna, a series of redundant captains. Everyone along the way is recruited to play a part in the charade of his obsessive endeavour knowingly to repay the wrong person. His sense of guilt is real enough, but it ...”

“... and geographical proximity no more connect Wharton to Picasso and Gertrude Stein than to Cole Porter, George Gershwin or Josephine Baker. ‘I do not write “jazz-books”,’ Wharton announced defensively in 1923; and all that jazz, as Lee makes clear, took in a lot of territory. ‘If Wharton had gone to visit the Eluards, just down the road,’ she ...”

“... very ably, to cope, with these abstruse business matters’) and instructs her to write to Mr Porter, the manager of their local branch of Lloyd’s Bank, who should have all the documents she’ll need. He tries to alert her to the burgeoning egotism of their 19-month-old son: me. ‘I suppose nothing will shame him at all & that he will always regard ...”

“... magic. Here it must be that arresting phrase, the right to play. Like Beaton, the Sitwells, Cole Porter, Nancy Cunard, Noël Coward, Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Lady Diana Cooper and countless other hedonistic Jazz Age types, Murphy, de Acosta and Garland took the right to play for granted, as well they might. Puritanism was an anachronism and in some ...”