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“... In​ the first series of ‘Sh!t the Dowager Countess Says’, the YouTube compilation of Maggie Smith’s one-liners from Downton Abbey, she asks, drily: ‘What is a weekend?’ Cue eye-rolling around his lordship’s dining table and smirks from viewers. But the countess was perhaps not being disingenuous for once, given that at this point in the loose chronology of Downton it is supposed to be about 1920 and she is going on eighty ...”

“... superficial similarities between the stories of the two books, and each of them is told in the first person. Moravia’s Edoardo is a professor of French in Rome, Updike’s Roger a professor of theology at an East Coast university in a city that has marked resemblances to Boston (it has, for example, a Christian Science cathedral). But these are parallels ...”

“... Helen tells Jo the neighbours are calling her a whore and berates her for throwing herself at the first man she met, Jo has an unanswerable retort: ‘I’m like you … they all know where I get it from.’ Helen tells Jo she should have got rid of her – and Jo shoots back that she wishes Helen had. It’s a terrible moment: mother and daughter agreeing ...”

“... bath and a walk. 8 o’clock breakfast: dry bread and milk or water. 2nd, immediately afterwards a first and then a second clyster; another short walk; then a cold compress on my abdomen. 3rd, around 12 o’clock: wet rub-down; short walk; fresh compress. Then lunch in my room with Karl [Ritter], to prevent insubordination. Then an hour spent in ...”

“... cinema sea! Nothing is real here but the salaries,’ Walpole wrote. A decade earlier, during his first trip to the US in 1926, Huxley had formed an incongruous friendship with Loos (at 4’11” she matched Huxley’s height sitting down; he said he’d like to keep her as a pet). On that visit Huxley had found America distasteful. In his volume of essays ...”

“... empire, five hundred years after da Gama’s departure and four hundred since The Lusiads were first published. The formal ending of that far-flung empire will be marked in December 1999 with the restoration to China of the port of Macau. In Africa, where the Lusophone territories won their independence in 1975, reasons for rejoicing were much reduced by ...”

“... stultifying drivel. In 1999, Blair calls to offer Mullin a post as a bottom-ranking minister. First he accepts. Next day he resigns. Blair gets back on the phone. He dangles the prospect of promotion to minister of state sooner rather than later. Mullin accepts again. He quits as chair of the Home Affairs Select Committee and joins what is baggily known ...”

“... and not for pleasure, though ‘the Law admonished a man not to copulate with a woman until he had first spoken affectionately to her ... and it was permissible to kiss and embrace a wife to whom one had been wed according to the laws.’ Singer is strong on sexual ecstasy, whether licit or illicit: but he also celebrates the joys of affection. In fact, he is ...”

“... others. The most modest anthropological enterprise necessarily involves comparison. In the first place, the comparison must be between the society described and that in whose language the description is cast. Few, however, have followed the explicitness of the young Margaret Mead in her first monograph, Coming of Age ...”

“... members. But it wasn’t until 1912, when she was almost forty, that she wrote Pointed Roofs, the first volume of what she saw as a new kind of novel. It marked the beginning of a project that was to be her life’s work and the basis for her (sometime) reputation as one of the most important innovators of the modern novel. Pilgrimage, as the novel came to be ...”

“... content but all the complex paraphernalia of professional intellectualism – takes care of the first difficulty. The second, the inescapable alterity of past lives and experiences, is simply denied. The line between past and present is erased with a magic phrase found in virtually every work of feminist hagiography: ‘ahead of their time’. ‘Like the ...”

“... hadn’t yet formulated itself as an issue in the culture. When the realisation did come, it at first didn’t seem of crucial importance, but that view soon began to change. The gay past in writing is sometimes explicit and sometimes hidden, while the gay present is, for the most part, only explicit. Soon in the Western world being gay will no longer ...”

“... of the story behind these Hart-Davis luncheons à deux. I can’t remember when Hart-Davis and I first met. Not at Eton, where, two years younger than myself, he was latterly absent for long periods owing to ill health. I did not even know him by sight. He went up to Balliol the term after I came down (and remained from choice only two terms in residence). I ...”

“... home by a caption in Bryan Appleyard’s biography: Rogers about to leave Belsize Grove for the first Lloyd’s interview in the Yves St Laurent suit’. It was grey, bought specially for the occasion, and worn with a borrowed tie. Appleyard’s account of the historical and theoretical lineage of Rogers’s architecture analyses ideas which had been ...”

“... In the early years, MacArthur was also associated with the Y chromosome and Wasp heritage. The first list of 21 winners, in 1981, contained 19 males, none of them carrying obvious Hispanic or Asian-American surnames. The July 2000 list has 12 women among 25 winners, and a generous speckling of names like Muñoz and Horng-Tzer Yau. Female and minority ...”