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“... truth, it seems both to Murdoch’s husband, John Bayley (‘Puss’), and to her biographer, Peter Conradi, that it did so here. In their view Murdoch’s advancing illness, crumbling away language and reason, laid bare in her an essential impulse toward love. As words broke up, it was the vocabulary of love and delight that survived the longest. When ...”

“... nor, it must be said, was Welles. Spike sets aside his campaign against blood sports to attend Prince Charles’s wedding, while Orson gloats when Princess Margaret in her eagerness to see him cuts Peter Sellers. But are the rest of us any better? Perhaps the spate of books about, say, the Mitford family is also a ...”

“... of Fenton’s best poems, such as ‘Dead Soldiers’, an extraordinary account of lunching with Prince Norodom in Cambodia, are to high-class war and travel journalism what brandy is to wine or calvados to cider. Well, here are your facts, obscure, exotic, detailed, packaged in the artfullest words – what more do you want? One can only reply that their ...”

“... preparations been more painstaking than in the run-up to the great demonstration at St Peter’s Fields on 16 August 1819. The crowds assembled to hear Orator Hunt speak about reform have been variously estimated at between 35,000 and 150,000. Manchester magistrates had plenty of experience in dealing roughly with large protests by desperate ...”

“... all the way up to Newfoundland, anywhere which was not already occupied by ‘any Christian prince or people’ (no look-in for Native Americans, of course). This arrogation was all the more sweeping because back in England the pattern of land ownership was still very varied. John Darby’s huge estate map of Smallburgh, Norfolk, dated a year before ...”

“... between his legs. Buyers were delighted – Theseus and Pirithous went to the wealthy collector Prince Nikolai Yusupov for six thousand francs – but the critics were frosty. ‘Austere men are shocked by the kind of studies which all this knowledge suggests to them,’ Jean-Baptiste Boutard wrote in 1806. One might hope, he said, that ‘Madame ...”

“... attempt to understand, control and make money from risk. The best version of this story is told in Peter Bernstein’s Against the Gods (1998), a fascinating account of risk, which makes the point that the study of risk is a humanist project, an attempt to abolish the idea of unknowable fate and replace it with the rational, quantifiable study of chance. The ...”

“... the fabled French actress sounds like Minnie Mouse on speed. She gabbles her way through ‘Oui, Prince, je brûle pour Thésée’ at a mad, cartoonish pace, ’r’s unrolling wildly in every direction. (Watch your head!) The reviewer dotes on her deranged-chipmunk tones, and has even been known to mimic them – along with accompanying pops and blops and ...”

“... nothing to his poem on Beethoven; more of Ivanov’s hallucinations. Did I know what had become of Prince Mirsky? ‘They drowned him in Kolyma. Yes, drowned. Boatloads of prisoners were simply sunk.’ The poem that began ‘Odna zvezda’ in Struve’s edition of her collected works was by someone else. Could no one any longer recognise the grammatical sign ...”

“... interests and a sober assessment of the threats to them. Force, a counsellor might say to his prince, is a tool a leader may use in response to those threats, but he should use it prudently and without emotion. Just as he should not trouble himself with questions of human rights or international law – though analysts might add these to a leader’s ...”

“... considerations.Which makes Woodward less journalist and more ambassador or courtier, more like Prince Bandar of Saudi Arabia, royal diplomat, gossip, host, March Hare, who pops up throughout his trilogy on the Bush administration’s wars, of which this is the third volume.* Woodward is not only granted audiences: he interviews Donald Rumsfeld, and ...”

“... was the most fashionable of environmental causes. There were international petitions and boycotts; Prince Charles and Al Gore were outspoken in their support. The campaign pivoted around the figure of Manser, the ‘Wild Man of Borneo’ or ‘Swiss Tarzan’, whose life possessed a Conradian glamour rarely glimpsed in an age of jet travel and media ...”

“... of his rage at intrusions into his privacy, and one remembers him forcing the withdrawal of John Peter’s article from Essays in Criticism because it suggested a homosexual element in his relationship with Jean Verdenal. Lyndall Gordon reports a conversation with Mary Trevelyan which makes him seem mildly amused about this imputation, but his first reaction ...”

“... as an ironic shorthand for the futility and mendacity of US policy. Eventually the filmmaker Peter Davis used the phrase as the title for his 1974 documentary which exposed the American invaders’ casual brutality and indifference towards Asian lives. Clinton was involved, however tangentially, in the antiwar counterculture. Yet, like everyone else in ...”

“... had rescued Mike Nichols from a man with a fierce dog in New York. He had fought physically with Peter O’Toole, using a broken bottle. He had got the overflow from his lavatory to pour a jet of water onto the head of a woman who was making her car hoot in the street below. Often it would be nothing more than an ugly exchange at a drinking party for which ...”