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“... before Christ was crucified. Yeats came to O Rathaille, or to this line of his, with the help of Frank O’Connor. Introducing O’Connor’s name, John Jordan introduces a writer who won a particular fame as a translator of Irish as well as a more widely acknowledged renown as a short-story writer in English. The translator has been of extraordinary ...”

“... Behaviour in the Human Male, better known as the ‘Kinsey Report’. Its author, as portrayed in James Jones’s exasperating biography, was no less of a paradox than his book. On this side, the public figure – a sober scientist with an original, careful methodology; over there, the man: a switch-hitting exhibitionist, voyeur and sadomasochist. The ...”

“... the theatre. Similarly dramatic transformations are to be repeated in other parts of the city. Frank Gehry has designed an enormous complex of shops, a basketball stadium and apartments to be built over marshalling yards in Brooklyn. Many residents are against the Gehry construction, though it is not the development itself that is likely to kill the ...”

“... technology: less 2000 than 2001. The first plate shows ‘Analyst/Programmer Peter James at work on the British Library Online Catalogue’. Peter James’s head is cropped to give a central prominence to his hands on the keyboard and the all-important screen which displays ...”

“... But the plucking out of harsh views on friends and fellow writers (as with Leonard Woolf’s and James Strachey’s edition of Virginia Woolf’s correspondence with Lytton Strachey) was inevitable. The truth is that Murry added nothing to Katherine’s writing that was not already there, that he made her popular, and that he kept her work continually in ...”

“... temperate and tropical, man-made and natural. ‘A complex of few interweavings’ is Henry James’s curtly paradoxical summary of the Florida scene. Heavy, stagnant air and violent hurricanes. Paradisiac contentment and accesses of sudden panic. The strange recumbent crescent moons. The deep shadows in the daytime. The snuffling or crisping animal ...”

“... collaborators) that he declared he was giving up theatre to write mystery novels. He rallied after James Lapine, a new collaborator, suggested doing something about Seurat and his painting of a Sunday afternoon at la Grande Jatte. That show ran for 604 performances, yet its ten Tony nominations led only to design prizes – there really is a Broadway faction ...”

“... with features almost sculptural in their clarity and bodies rendered in solid swathes of colour. James Hepburn (1922) and Rupert Doone (1922-23), in particular, are reminiscent of the stylised portraits of Modigliani (Hamnett was a close friend of his). Her bust-length paintings aren’t set in recognisable interiors but place their sitters against muted ...”

“... or Missouri, or Victoria, once homes to the mythical Robin Hood and the real Jesse James and Ned Kelly, no longer are. Still, if we move out from Hobsbawm’s focus on the social bandit as actual individual, and consider the entire Robin Hood myth, the ideal remains familiar in our outlaw-free world. The myth requires a great mass of heavily ...”

“... the creation of the CIA. Without Fleming, Cockburn wrote on the fiftieth anniversary of the first James Bond novel, ‘the Cold War would have ended in the early 1960s. We would have had no Vietnam, no Nixon, no Reagan and no Star Wars.’ As adjutant to Britain’s chief of naval intelligence, Lieutenant Commander Fleming undertook a secret mission to ...”

“... his wife, Eliza Wilson, Walter remained a key figure in Stuckey’s. Eliza was the daughter of James Wilson, the owner-founder of the Economist, who also became Palmerston’s financial secretary to the Treasury. Wilson, a genial, acute, hard-driving Scot, was then picked out to rescue the finances of India after the Mutiny of 1857, which he did with a ...”

“... else can only be known by getting inside and asking questions. Tracking down a Sullivan Bank or a Frank Lloyd Wright house in its native habitat, seeing the physical context of buildings which also have an art-historical context: these are pleasures and an education. The assumptions which the taxonomy of style and the hierarchies of art history underpin can ...”

“... smaller numbers, often challenging, however subtly, the received idea of the Irish immigrant. Even Frank McCourt. Between them, Angela’s Ashes and ’Tis have sold more than five million copies in the United States – and ’Tis has only just come out in paperback.† McCourt and his brothers have had their lives recorded for the movies, and anyone writing ...”

“... Myrna Loy and Ike to enjoy watching shoot-’em-ups; underdog Harry Truman had been inspired by Frank Capra’s 1948 State of the Union and, as the son of a sometime Hollywood mogul, Kennedy was groomed for glamorous stardom. But no American president before Nixon had ever made a public pronouncement based on his experience of a movie, and, Ronald ...”

“... I’ll take the one that’s a bit of a failure.’ On every floor of the gallery’s new Frank Gehry building there are paintings you could spend half a day in front of, like Monet’s Déjeuner sur l’herbe of 1866 (three years after the Manet of the same name), which sets the fall and sweep and swoop of human forms and clothing against the fall ...”