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“... Given drew on satellite tracking before sailing into the canal. It was also a definitively bad day for the Egyptian pilots who were in charge of the ship during its passage through the canal. Also annoyed and upset: everyone stuck on board the several hundred ships waiting to go through. Everyone worried about the stupefyingly diverse cargo on board all ...”

“... macro level: Irving Stone’s 1934 novel, made into an honourably hilarious film in 1956 with Kirk Douglas as Van Gogh and Anthony Quinn as Gauguin, was called Lust for Life. The original Dutch phrase, as rendered in the great six-volume set of letters published in 2009 by the Van Gogh Museum, was ‘zest for life’. We have a problem of seeing, just as we ...”

“... reign at the Telegraph with the stream of memos which flowed from his fifth floor eyrie every day. They were occasionally constructive, rarely complimentary and almost invariably nit-picking – the work of a man who was obsessed by the small change of journalism. Hartwell’s great merit was that he insisted on a fair and balanced presentation of ...”

“... I wonder.’ With Jewett’s encouragement, Cather left McClure’s. She went to visit her brother Douglas, who was working for the railroad in Winslow, Arizona. The South-West – former Spanish territory, more rugged and sublime than Nebraska – thrilled her. She wrote that Albuquerque was ‘like the country between Marseille and Nice only much more ...”

“... to stay in the United Kingdom ‘for the moment, see how it goes, maybe I’ll feel different one day …’ This sort of self-persuasion also released a horde of disgusted Scottish Lib Dems into the SNP park. Talking to some of them in Edinburgh and Glasgow, I saw that this was often their second migration. Once they had been refugees from Blairism and New ...”

“... He was ‘a notoriously bad correspondent’, who wrote very few letters by the standards of the day, for the most part only when business was pressing or ‘when he was goaded into it by his friends’. As a result, just 193 of his letters survive, and a further 129 written to him, most of the correspondence dating from the later part of his life, after the ...”

“... Delius incorporated some of this music into Florida (1887), which depicts across four movements a day on the plantation, and in later works such as Appalachia (1902) and his opera Koanga (1897). This was based on an episode from an 1880 novel, The Grandissimes: A Story of Creole Life, by the American author George Washington Cable. One central character is an ...”

“... technique of diving and a technique of education in diving which had been discovered in Mauss’s day, and as with every technique, it involved an apprenticeship. Then again, Mauss noticed that there were even techniques of sleep. It is quite misleading to say that the way we sleep is something entirely natural. There are societies that have nothing to sleep ...”

“... and the powerful oratorical passage on the death of Jo, ending, ‘And dying thus around us every day,’ might have been used to separate those who sneer at any vigorous specimen of eloquence from those who know good rhetoric from bad: but Vickers does not do so. He does, however, cite the hell-fire sermon from Joyce’s Portrait, where oratory, frankly ...”

“... limits), the workings of the prison system and the jury system kept from the light of common day, and national security in its varied applications most rigidly safeguarded. Personal experience obliges me to agree with him that ‘the love of indirection, the cosiness of a tight personal élite, and the sheer self-importance of government servants, find ...”

“... used it to demonstrate a completely different ideology from that of the present government. Douglas Hurd, the last effective home secretary, made little attempt to exploit the Home Office for electoral mobilisation. The rot began with Michael Howard, who was resolute in his attempt to make Labour appear ‘soft’ on crime, immigration etc. In their ...”

“... judges offering superlatives on the jacket of Hugo Williams’s Collected Poems – Edna Longley, Douglas Dunn and Peter Porter – none is English. And yet Williams, born in Windsor during World War Two, the son of the English actor Hugh Williams, schooled by Life and Eton, a youthful toiler for Alan Ross’s London Magazine, an erstwhile globetrotter and a ...”

“... the Tuileries, birds were singing.’ Elsewhere, a young woman cries too, and we are told that ‘day was breaking, and some wagons were driving by.’ And on one extraordinary occasion, the real world doesn’t comment or go on its way: it stops in its tracks. Frédéric is happy for once, and ‘the tall trees out in the garden that, till now, had been ...”

“... Raphael gets around to a little scepticism about the word ‘genius’, but rather late in the day, on page 158 to be precise. He is convinced Kubrick is a great director, but doesn’t do much to show us why, and while his epigrammatic analyses of Kubrick’s character are clever and plausible, they have the air of self-contained fictions, unruffled by ...”

“... be said for holding a political party together. This puritanical approach to the nitty-gritty of day-to-day politics begins to set the teeth on edge when Owen condemns Wilson for being obsessed with plots against him, on almost the same page as he reveals how deeply he himself was involved in those all too real plots. Even ...”