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“... much sitting around in cars, parked or stuck in slow-moving traffic; a couple of walks across a field to a barn – all described in the careful, even, unostentatious, curiously compelling sentences that have served Ishiguro so well for nearly forty years. The dramatic centrepiece of Never Let Me Go is a visit to a second-hand shop in Cromer.It’s not a ...”

“... towns – an example, Goebbels said, of ‘England’s assassination of European culture’. Hans Frank, governor general of Nazi-occupied Poland, said his aim was ‘to elevate the Polish people to the honour of European civilisation’, even as he trashed and looted the vast art collections of the Polish aristocracy, banned performances of Chopin and sent ...”

“... and folksy, but the family lived in a modernist house designed by an uncle who had studied with Frank Lloyd Wright. Russell was named for his father, with whom he seems to have had a fractious but intensely close relationship; an ex-girlfriend remembers being surprised that even in his early twenties Russell still routinely referred to Charles Sr as ...”

“... that it was extremely unlikely the disease could jump to humans. This is a surprisingly frank admission, but perhaps less so for a scientist working in Brahic’s field. Prion research is characterised by unexpected observations that seem to violate the scientific consensus. How and why do proteins, which are ...”

“... in France where deserters had been executed and took a photograph at first light of the empty field; the resulting sequence, Shot at Dawn, is one of the most powerful acts of memory the centenary inspired. Hic jacet mattered, and still matters, in this new, secular form of ritual enchantment.Some families resisted the vast new necropolises, and smuggled ...”

“... In fact, in 1978, the year after Lowell’s death, Blackwood posted them to Lowell’s friend Frank Bidart in Boston. Bidart, Saskia Hamilton writes, ‘put the envelope under his bed, and later transferred it to the Houghton Library in Harvard, with a cover note stating that “This packet of letters belongs to the Estate of Robert Lowell, not to ...”

“... I was specially pleased to see that Lewis Thomas devotes a chapter to neurology, since this is the field in which, as a hospital patient, I specialised. Neurology today is very like medicine in general fifty to a hundred years ago, in its preoccupation with interpretation and diagnosis and the relative backwardness of treatment. But in Lewis Thomas’s ...”

“... friend called Jane all his life. ‘I don’t think he had the faintest idea what laundry was,’ Frank Auerbach said. ‘He put it into this basket and it came back from Jane immaculately laundered.’ After he left school, his father took a piece of sculpture – a sandstone horse, almost two feet high, ‘three legs serving convincingly as four’ – that ...”

“... did not become them, as it could seem to in Europe. In American movies, in Preston Sturges, in Frank Capra, the crowds whizz past in their comfortable clothes, and each person might be thinking their own thoughts, before one of them, Claudette Colbert or Jimmy Stewart, steps out. And if they seem wildly capable of being themselves, that capability is ...”

“... he ultimately settled on psychiatry after reading in Krafft-Ebing’s textbook that it was a field where theory still bore the personal stamp of the author. Jung arrived at the Burghölzli hospital on 10 December 1900. Thus began what could have been the greatest psychiatric career of the 20th century. No account of Jung is adequate that does not take ...”

“... in Love to have been a soft-focus, rural idyll, and I fall to imagining a red sun rising behind a field of gently rippling Bohemian corn, and, beyond it, a girl in a dirndl beckoning seductively. ‘Good morning, Sales Ledger, this is Martine, how may I help you?’ I have been put through.Phone-hold music is a late, trivial but characteristic effect of the ...”

“... allies and the substantial egos of Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, Charles de Gaulle, Field Marshal Montgomery and General Patton. Dad thought Eisenhower was a man with ballast, a leader. But the Finnegans wanted to argue Ike’s policies.Note the trace of red-baiting in the bit about the steel company (‘un-American’); the implication that ...”

“... respectability he volunteers for Vietnam, where he serves his 365 days as a private in a field transport unit. The bulk of Buffalo Afternoon deals with the war. And it is clear that the veterans to whom Schaeffer listened did not mince their words. The novel contains hideous and wholly convincing battle descriptions. We learn the effect of white ...”

“... ignored the linkage between beliefs about sex and sexual practices. As a result, ‘he leaves the field of bodies and pleasures perfectly intact as a subject of historical enquiry, with its linkages to belief, if one only chooses to investigate it.’ Shortly afterwards, in 1984, Peter Gay, in The Bourgeois Experience: Education of the Senses, published new ...”

“... had already succeeded in expanding her M.O.W. into M.O.W.O. Having married her maternal cousin, Frank Oliphant, before she ever laid claim to her work, the novelist managed to efface her maiden name and to emerge in print with her mother’s. Since that mother had a fierce conviction of the aristocratic superiority of her family to her husband’s, doubling ...”