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“... arrest, although the emergency services arrive swiftly and do what they can. At the hospital a young doctor looks nervous at the prospect of telling Didion the final news. A social worker says: ‘It’s OK. She’s a pretty cool customer.’ Quintana makes a fragile recovery and is able to attend her father’s funeral in New York on 23 March 2004. Two ...”

“... sixty. A few passers-by watch the arrival of the celebrities, of which there seem to be only two, Michael Yorke and Michael Caine (who later slags off the film). The audience is not star-studded either and heavily sprinkled with those freaks, autograph-hunters and emotional cripples who haunt the stage-doors of American ...”

“... expected to know about. Who is Mary McCarthy writing for? Either the decidedly elderly or the very young might respond: the first because they can remember what she is talking about, if they knew those sections of American life; the second because it is a thrill to hear the sacred monster reminisce. The inbetweens can only remember with nostalgia her novels ...”

“... eyesight, though her hand was still steady, without any trembling.It was far from usual for young men like Van Dyck to express admiration for blind, elderly women. Yet the meeting made a deep impression on him. Not only is this the longest description of a person or a painting to be found in the sketchbook he kept during his Italian years, it is also ...”

“... literature of our times. I was living in a civilisation which despised the old and worshipped the young. But somehow I never took these dire threats seriously. I belong to an old tribe and I knew that literature thrives best on ancient faith, timeless hopes, and illusions. Singer has always stood out against the lures of Modernism. The strength of his ...”

“... of ‘the ink of light’, of ‘writing with pictures’, is immense, as is his faith in young filmmakers and young audiences. Above all Cocteau loyally represents what the cinema might be. ‘What a lesson in freedom you give all of us,’ he quotes Alain Resnais as saying; and Truffaut repaid the lesson by ...”

“... for life’s shortness. The voices can be divided. The experiences of, for example, Kathy Acker or Michael Ignatieff are very different from those of the men and women who arrived in Britain from Africa and Asia. Of these, some had a start in their new lives, some had none. By and large, the blacker and poorer they were, the worse time they had. And many of ...”

“... the Schlumberger fortune (made from drill bits for oil wells). Along with a third collaborator, a young art historian called Helen Winkler, Friedrich and de Menil saw that this new work had opened a structural gap in the art world – neither private nor public, its scale was beyond the means of individual collectors but also outside the domain of art museums ...”

“... laid down by those legendary figures of his paper, C.P. Scott and A.P. Wadsworth, who told their young men to stick to their stories. At a time when grasshoppering has become the journalistic norm, people on both sides of the Belgrano argument will talk to any journalist who has a corpus of knowledge. It’s all very human. Even men and women, even Admirals ...”

“... sad and resigned, it wears a tired face, seamed and worn, similar to our own.’ All over Europe young men were finding out much the same thing, but this scholar and essayist, the friend and colleague of Benedetto Croce, put the matter unusually well. Like most young Italian intellectuals of the time, he was keen on ...”

“... a hair’s 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 ...”

“... In the fall of 2002, in the company of a dog named Charlie Chaplin and an architect named Michael Meredith, I set out to drive a 1960 Chevy Apache 10 pick-up truck, at 45 mph, from far west Texas to New York City: 2364 miles through desert, suburbs, forests, lake-spattered plains, mountains, farmland, more suburbs and the Holland Tunnel ...”

“... last month set up public inquiries into two monstrous scandals involving serial sexual abuse of young people and children in homes in which they had been placed for their own ‘care’. The first inquiry is into abuse in private and council homes in North Wales and follows an earlier inquiry commissioned by Clwyd County Council (now disbanded) and ...”

“... All his life he kept his distance. At readings and concerts he would notice a young man, gaze at him, make his presence felt and understood, and later, in the semi-privacy of his diaries, record the moment. On Sunday morning, 31 October 1920, for example, when he was still working on The Magic Mountain, he went with Katia, his wife, to an open rehearsal of the Missa Solemnis, a work which would figure in Doctor Faustus more than twenty years later ...”

“... Communists any share of the credit. For the right wing, the Resistance was monopolised by heroic young officers, avatars of the Yorcks, Scharnhorsts and Gneisenaus who roused Prussia to resistance in the Napoleonic era and who they can now join in the nationalist pantheon. This is no worse, admittedly, than the contrary myth propagated in old DDR, that the ...”