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“... corner from the Maison Empereur, in a quarter named after aristocratic diplomats, the Noailles. More commonly known as the belly of Marseille, this was where the land once hoovered up what had arrived by sea, not just from other Mediterranean ports, but from the barge traffic of the Rhône, and where all the merchandise was put into shops and warehouses, or ...”

“... museum this summer for a scrap of cloth from one of Marie-Antoinette’s dresses, which Chantal Thomas mentions in her lively and imaginative examination of the public personae of the French Queen. This fragment of cloth was carried to the scaffold, she says, by Barnave, who was first seen as an extreme revolutionary but later became an adviser to the ...”

“... locations where the killings took place. But the true crime genre has a much longer lineage. More than four centuries ago a series of plays closely based on real murder cases appeared on the London stage. Their literary quality is variable – they tend to melodrama and moralising, and indeed to misogyny (they often feature murderous wives) – but some ...”

“... and function of hotels. After his world-beating Freudian serve with The White Hotel here is D.M. Thomas again, standing on the baseline at the start of his new novel in yet another hotel setting. The Soviet poet, Rozanov, is sharing his bed with a blind woman whom he has arranged to meet because he fancies a literally blind date, and she is a fervent admirer ...”

“... and left to gather dust’. It won’t come as a surprise that the misfits turn out to be rather more useful than the Park reckoned, and invariably end up antiheroes of the hour before the story’s done. Their stock complaint that nothing ever happens at Slough House, that they never get to do any real intelligence work, is less convincing with every ...”

“... were once reluctant to speak of a rat’s ‘hunger’, but this was because agreement is more forthcoming as to how long it is since an animal was last fed than on how hungry it is. Similarly, those experimenters who used the number of faecal boluses excreted by a rat as an index of its degree of fearfulness were not denying the reality of the ...”

“... story about Marlowe’s origins in Canterbury and his doings at Corpus in Cambridge, and a rather more realistic take on Marlowe’s life. But where he claims ‘a close, unromantic alertness to politics and religion, as well as to explicit facts about individuals’, I am not too convinced. The book is full of minor errors on both points. Faversham is not ...”

“... a transparent liquid, first viscous and sluggish, like a jelly of meaning, then ever thinner and more mobile, flowing faster and faster until it reached me at the speed of thinking and I could not entirely distinguish the suggestions it was making from my own thoughts. I had undergone the acceleration into the written word that you also experience as a ...”

“... The​ Biltmore Hotel in Coral Gables, Florida is enormous. So is its pool, which you could say is more of a lake. When Madonna stayed there in the early 1990s, she apparently insisted on having the pool to herself, less for the swimming perhaps, and more because as a material goddess she could ...”

“... It looks​ , for now, more than 11 weeks after the inconclusive general election, as though Italy is about to have a new government. On Friday, 18 May, the Movimento 5 Stelle and the Lega Nord published the text of a coalition agreement, signed by their respective leaders, Luigi Di Maio and Matteo Salvini, and overwhelmingly approved by the members of both parties ...”

“... processes and activities through which, as embodied creatures, we, like other organisms, interact more or less effectively with our continuously changing environments, thereby ourselves changing more or less continuously’. About knowledge she says: What we come to call the truth or validity of some statement ...”

“... to break up with her because he was in love in Rianna, she assumed he was joking. It took several more texts to convince her he wasn’t. Once she was convinced, however, ‘That was it. I haven’t talked to him since.’ It was the texting as much as the fancying of Rianna that she couldn’t forgive him. By sending a serious message using a medium they’d ...”

“... a strong line over questions of definition and evaluation; and each contains much to applaud. Thomas Kinsella’s New Oxford Book goes right back to the beginning, to a rath in front of an oak wood singled out for comment by some anonymous poet of the sixth century, and cherished as a survival from an even more distant ...”

“... La Rochefoucauld Don Paterson and I were crossing the Wolfe Tone Bridge in Galway contemplating Thomas Crapper. This was at early o’clock in the morning on our way back from an awful curry at the only Indian restaurant open in Galway in the wee hours. The night was mild, and our thoughts drifted towards talk of Crapper as the air behind us burned with the ...”