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“... married. Nancy insisted on her doing a London season, and that was how she met her first husband, Paul Phipps. He was an elegant English architect, impecunious, often out of work, and the best dancer in London. They produced two children. The eldest became the famous comedienne Joyce Grenfell. Nancy put them on the family payroll, which gave her the clout to ...”

“... he wrote to his wife. So much for that famous peaceableness.) More serious exponents were Paul Claudel, poet and diplomat (Shanghai, he wrote in 1896, was ‘an industrious honeycomb communicating in all its parts, perforated like an ant-hill’), and Victor Segalen, poet, novelist and physician, who travelled in China between 1909 and 1917. More ...”

“... Richard Kearney’s essay ‘Myth and Terror’, in which he resorts to Mircea Eliade and Paul Ricoeur to understand and, apparently, to pacify the mythic repetitions – of sacrifice, blood and apocalypse – he finds in modern Ireland. There is also much medition on Celtic mythology, the hero, God and Man, and Yeats’s question: When Pearse ...”

“... conspiratorial intensity which imbued them with a mock-gravity bordering on the hilarious. At the foot of an immensely long undergraduate essay on George Eliot, written by a friend of mine, he wrote, ‘Some good things here, I expect,’ a comment that was both a reproof and a vote of confidence, while at the same time managing to say everything about the ...”

“... when it came out last year, and the paperback carries glowing tributes from Christopher Hope and Paul Bailey. I don’t find myself reaching for superlatives like them, but it certainly isn’t any old first novel. Wartime Lies is a stylish and gripping account of how a Jewish boy and his beautiful, resourceful aunt manage to stay alive and out of the camps ...”

“... one): a gold processional cross, folded up as if to be put in a bag or box, but originally about a foot tall. In addition there are several small crosses, something that might be part of an ecclesiastical headdress and what appears to be the base of an altar cross. Most revealing, though, is an inscribed strip, perhaps once also fixed to the arm of a ...”

“... edges of the known world, medieval travellers encountered creatures who held a single giant foot over their head as a makeshift parasol and fearsome hybrids with eyes peering out from their chests or set in the middle of their foreheads: they were classed as wonders, close kin to the monsters and dragons of classical genealogies. When Thomas Browne was ...”

“... breadth of becoming deputy leader of the Party. Opinions differ, but a Party led by Michael Foot and Benn would probably have seen a mass defection of MPs to the SDP. As it was, Benn’s failure paved the way for Neil Kinnock’s purge of the Militant Left, as well as the crucial policy switch from renationalisation of key industries to ‘social ...”

“... Ababa is a photograph of the emperor, slight, dignified and dazed, leaving his palace. At the foot of the steps is a Volkswagen Beetle, flanked by dull-looking men in military uniform. The crowd shouted ‘thief’ as Selassie was driven away in the back seat. He was never seen in public again. Members of his family were arrested, and many of them taken ...”

“... find tricky quotation, numerical patterns, foreign languages and ‘verbivocovisual’ effects in Paul Muldoon, or in John Hollander, the Yale-based poet and critic who stands about as far as any serious writer in America from neo-modernist or avant-garde programmes. Hollander’s Powers of Thirteen (1983) consists of 169 sonnet-like units with 13 lines of 13 ...”

“... performance of Schoenberg’s music. Kokoschka wrote for the theatre. According to the playwright Paul Kornfeld, ‘a drama by Kokoschka is only a variation on his pictures and vice versa. Tone and melody, rhythm and gesture in his words are paralleled by the same effects in his pictures.’ Drama and spectacle, the arts as one, life as full-bodied ...”

“... so nearly 140 feet long – beneath the surface of the sea. Above it was a wingless, fifty-foot-long UFO shaped like a ‘tic-tac’, which flew in erratic patterns over the submerged object, then began to mirror Fravor’s plane’s movements as he brought it around in a circle. When Fravor flew towards the UFO it shot off at great speed; he went back ...”

“... to brilliant effect, working with some of France’s best film composers, including Martial Solal, Paul Misraki and Georges Delerue. But there was sometimes so little dialogue that his assistants wondered what the actors were supposed to do. ‘On va dilater,’ he would tell them – ‘We’re going to stretch out’ – like a jazz musician discussing how ...”

“... Sun Wot Won It’; and more recent governments convinced themselves that the Daily Mail under Paul Dacre’s editorship was the voice of the electorate. In reality, Beaverbrook often got public opinion quite wrong and made his papers announce imminent triumph for parties that then lost elections – most spectacularly in 1945. William Maxwell ...”

“... Lewis had an affair, came to the conclusion that ‘on the whole, he was half a SHIT,’ while Paul Nash told Lewis that his character was ‘strangely sub-human’. His bellicosity towards those reckless enough to be generous towards him was even fiercer: when a cheque from his patron Fanny Wadsworth didn’t turn up promptly, she received a postcard that ...”