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“... the delicate, ‘fey-looking’ Duncan, has a weird job in a candle factory: his old friend Robert Fraser can’t believe it when he finds him there, working in what is essentially sheltered employment for people too damaged to do anything else. Plus, Duncan has moved in with an elderly man he calls Uncle Horace, although he is no relation, ‘the man ...”

“... 1596 the company’s business manager, James Burbage (Richard’s father), purchased a large stone building in the western range of the Blackfriars precinct, intending to refit it as a theatre. It was a two-storey structure which had once housed the ‘frater’ or refectory of the monastery; its upper floor had more recently been subdivided into seven ...”

“... return. The demands of courtship were changed irrevocably by the rise of letter-writing. As Robert Darnton has argued, ‘living cannot be distinguished from reading, nor loving from the writing of love letters.’ Today, extramarital affairs are most likely to be discovered by reading a partner’s emails or texts. In fact, having an affair and using ...”

“... people violently and often and at such moments she was not silent, often in unexpected ways. When Robert Graves sold a copy of her book The Sleeping Beauty, which she had inscribed to him ‘in admiration’, she bought it back and resold it after adding: ‘I wrote this dedication at a time when Robert Graves was a ...”

“... dramatic events of the conflict: the battle of Teruel, when he, Hemingway and the photographer Robert Capa accompanied Republican forces during their heady initial victories; the siege of Barcelona, where ‘I and a million others saw things which Dante could not have imagined’; the Ebro fighting, when Hemingway saved Matthews’s life by preventing his ...”

“... corrosion. Two other towns, Trouville and Barentin, contributed to the project and received stone statues. These have worn less well. At Trouville Flaubert’s upper thigh has had to be patched, and bits of his moustache have fallen off: structural wires poke out like twigs from a concrete stub on his upper lip. Perhaps the foundry’s assurances can be ...”

“... he remounts to leave, the listeners hear ‘his foot upon the stirrup,/And the sound of iron on stone’.Like much of de la Mare’s best work, ‘The Listeners’ both stimulates and evades the urge to impose on it a coherent and clarifying interpretation, leaving the reader as ‘perplexed’ as its protagonist, as haunted as its ‘lone house’. Time ...”

“... to Montagu, this was no cause for alarm: the cost and ratio of raw footage to edited film for Robert Flaherty’s Man of Aran were similar. Because the film had to be sent back to Hollywood for processing, Eisenstein never had access to rushes; so he filmed more takes than he would have needed, just in case. Never having made a film before, the Sinclairs ...”

“... but the British seized a collection of antiquities destined for the Louvre – including a stone slab found at Rashid (or Rosetta) in the Delta, whose three inscriptions were already seen as a potential key to reading hieroglyphs. Words were added to the sides of the slab when it reached London: ‘Captured in Egypt by the British Army in 1801’ and ...”

“... Influenced by the very Englishly expressed Victorian socialism of William Morris, H.M. Hyndman and Robert Blatchford, the cause had been taken up and redirected by G.K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc in the first decade of the 20th century. It had been resumed in the 1920s by various other figures, including H.J. Massingham, a former guild socialist who ...”

“... to him. This enthralling new account of Sorge, by the veteran British journalist and old Asia hand Robert Whymant, confirms what I had long suspected: Sorge and Philby were psychic twins, two textbook examples of the rare species we might call Homo undercoverus – those who find the dull, unclassified lives that the rest of us lead simply not (Sorge ...”

“... afternoon, with its atmosphere of electioneering and death, brings to mind the insistent taps of Robert Lowell’s ‘For the Union Dead’: The stone statues of the abstract Union Soldier grow slimmer and younger each year – wasp-waisted, they doze over muskets and muse through their sideburns. Senator John Forbes ...”

“... and of Boulez, strict application of their own theory to their creative work has tended to produce stone-dead music (the former’s Wind Quintet Op. 26, the latter’s two books of Structures for two pianos), while their best pieces invariably entail adjustments of theory. On the other hand, those works which it can be argued really do embody fruitful ...”

“... book was Byt i bytie Mariny Tsvetaevoy; in a note to the English translation Angela Living-stone plausibly explains why this was abandoned in favour of the simple name: could it possibly have been translated as ‘The Living and Being of Marina Tsvetaeva’? Or ‘Marina Tsvetaeva: Her Everyday Existence and Her Higher – or Inner – Being’? Or ...”

“... tomb are just as sartorial. What if Armani and Calvin Klein diversified into the undertaking and stone-dressing business? I could fancy an eternity of decomposition under a layered beige, beautifully cut headstone. But could my cheapskate descendant be trusted not to shop around and dump me in the Monsoon cemetery for dead hippies? Planning the style of ...”