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“... The interiors are bedrooms and bars, basements and dank living rooms, wallpapered or splattered brown or plastered with notes and images. As the sequence progresses, associations form, with visual jokes and provocative contrasts. Mouths keep mashing against ears, chins, other mouths; arms wrap themselves around necks and waists; hands hold other hands. Her ...”

“... barefoot or otherwise. I then went to see K. B. McFarlane. My special subject in Schools was Richard II so I had been to McFarlane’s lectures on the Lollard Knights; I also had a copy of some notes on his 1953 Ford Lectures that was passed down from year to year in Exeter. I knew of his austere reputation and of his reluctance to publish from David ...”

“... percetive study of three men who died young, the painter Christopher Wood (1901-30), the war hero, Richard Hillary (1919-43), and Jeremy Wolfenden (1934-65) who was (or is?) the most spectacular failure of my Oxford generation. Faulks believes that ‘short lives are more sensitive indicators of the pressure of public attitudes than lives lived long and ...”

“... and leading news correspondents Crane met in Cuba such as Charles Michelson, Ernest McCready and Richard Harding Davis. These are rich materials but at the same time they are incomplete and sparse. Crane was not a prolific letter-writer and he left no diaries or memoir. Further confusing matters was Crane’s first biographer, Thomas Beer, whose Stephen ...”

“... analogous to the ‘Brunonian’ theory of medicine, invented by the Scottish physician John Brown, who had taught that health was an equilibrium between the ‘excitability’ of the nervous system, and the external stimuli by which it was activated. Every disease was the result either of insufficient stimulation, and therefore of wasted ...”

“... it can’t. Hence the current perplexity. History might reasonably credit Stephen J. Gould and Richard Lewontin as the first to notice that something may be seriously wrong in this part of the wood. Their 1979 paper, ‘The Spandrels of S. Marco and The Panglossian Paradigm: A Critique of the Adaptationist Programme’, ignited an argument about the ...”

“... it was the Democratic coterie that had elevated him which rallied round. The campaign was led by Richard Holbrooke, imposing the changes in Annan’s entourage that were deemed necessary to save him. In fact, what is really striking about Annan’s tenure as secretary-general is less his personal characteristics than the nature of the inner circle that ...”

“... Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan) is little more than a propaganda outfit. The NHS? Crippled by Blair and Brown with their PFIs and privatisations and now well on its own way to privatisation thanks to the last Health Bill. The railway companies? Loathed by the bulk of their ‘customers’ they still receive state subsidies although the idea of renationalising them ...”

“... A train rushes across a bridge and is bearing down on a hare that’s running over the washed-brown bed of a railway track. The hare isn’t immediately obvious because it is partially obscured by the driving rain. The train will catch up with the hare and kill it: there’s no escape, the track is encased by walls. The hare’s typical act of ...”

“... cream-coloured leather armchair, in a carefully designed room decorated in white, beige and brown, enhanced by the candy pink of what look like balls of straw stacked up in large vases, he speaks calmly, without raising his voice, in impeccable English. ‘The autonomous government gave money for the returnees, 40 million Sudanese pounds [about nine ...”

“... to present them as heroically English, and when he calls Eden the ‘happy garden’ he is echoing Richard II, set on the brink of an earlier civil war. In his famous speech, the dying John of Gaunt calls England This other Eden, demi-paradise, This fortress built by nature for herself Against infection and the hand of war, This happy breed of men ...”

“... colony. We have a programme and a list of guests. Jeremy Treglown is there, but where are Richard Gere and Bernardo Bertolucci? Where is Kurt Vonnegut? The bus sizzles along wet roads flanked by blackened chunks of Kendal Mint Cake and we debuss at the tiny Peredelkino church, where a service for Pasternak is to be held. The choir has not yet arrived ...”

“... of scooter-borne rock fans, draped in the ambiguous insignia of RAF targets and Union Jacks. What Richard Weight calls the ‘very British style’ of Mod found its initial foothold in late 1950s Soho with the arrival of the jazz ‘modernists’, who defined themselves in strict opposition to the reigning gatekeepers of Trad. Modernists were wilfully ...”

“... of ice-cream, almost perfectly round a moment ago, dissolve slowly in even, hybrid trickles of brown and white. I watched movement, myself unmoving, my eyes fixed on the dish. My hands lay stiff on the table, and I tried with all my might to keep still, to hold onto immobility. But I could feel motion oozing over my body too. The immobile is in a ...”

“... in school alongside some big overgrown Negroes.’ His respect for the Court’s decision in the Brown v. Topeka case was quite genuine, as he showed in his frank discussion of it in one of the letters which he used to write to his boyhood friend Swede Hazlett and which have been collected by Robert Griffith: he just thought the Southern states should have ...”