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“... exile was a traumatic experience, whose grip on his personality would tighten over the years. As David Kertzer shows in this subtle and brilliantly told account, the exile of Pius IX was an event that shaped modern Europe. The revolution that broke out in Rome in the spring of 1848 had begun not with protests, but with jubilation. Little was known of ...”

“... Tynan) to write a musical on nuclear war; the Spectator appointed him film critic, and his friend David Astor got him permanent residence and made him a regular reporter on the Observer. Lessing and Sigal inspired and tormented each other in equal measure. ‘She blames me for forcing her into other men’s arms. (“You made me do it. I’m really a one-man ...”

“... It’s got to tear [the audience] apart, scream at them, that’s what my character is.’In David Looseley’s new interpretation, Piaf’s notoriously elusive life story is best told as cultural history. This is a book about Piaf and her crowd. Rather than trying to get to the ‘real’ Piaf, as Robert Belleret did in Piaf, un mythe français ...”

“... the unappealing high school student who is so hard to get rid of. Everyone else in the book keeps wearing the green-tinted spectacles, and no one but Bast shares this erratic pre-teen wizard’s secrets. The trouble is that to make the plot plausible, or near plausible, Edward Bast must become a moral weakling, unsympathetic if not actively annoying, unable ...”

“... infancy. Nazneen stays at home during the day, has few friends other than Razia, who goes around wearing a Union Jack sweatshirt, and is locked into a chafingly dull existence until, in 2001, she falls in love with a sweatshop-owner’s nephew, Karim. Their clandestine affair takes place against a background of increasing Islamisation, which Karim himself ...”

“... staying on course. ‘We’re shocked,’ he said, ‘but we’ll go about our business.’ He was wearing a blue cap that said: ‘Trump. 45th President’. He then spoke to CBS. ‘Someone else died – we’re horrified at that. But this is not going to stop Republicans from participating in the democratic process.’‘What about security?’‘I think ...”

“... one would expect from any collection of pictures, except for the jarring and very public Star of David which feels eerily as if it had invaded the private space of the pictures without its bearers having noticed. There were 1536 such pictures in the first, 1994 French edition; 1834 in the 1995 edition; another 497 in a January 1996 supplement; and a further ...”

“... a trailer for Peter Jackson’s new Beatles documentary, Get Back; a new documentary about Mark David Chapman; an article trailed as ‘the inside story of how Bowie met John Lennon’; a lockdown viewing of the dreary Richard Curtis film Yesterday; a mystifying Japanese tweet, apparently about Ringo.And those are just the ones I remembered to jot ...”

“... diplomats have all called on Thein Sein. Each has returned cautious, but unmistakably impressed. David Cameron, who this week became the most important visitor so far, urged us all to ‘pay tribute … to the leadership of President Thein Sein and his government, which has been prepared to release political prisoners, hold by-elections and legalise ...”

“... I spoke with a middle-aged woman standing next to a large York Momentum banner. She was wearing a ‘Corbynista’ T-shirt (she told me she’d had it printed herself); next to her a man was wearing a ‘Superman’ T-shirt, blue with ‘Jeremy Corbyn’ spelled out in red and yellow block capitals on the ...”

“... man at a party in Paris. Balzac has tremendous fun describing the man. First his clothes: he is wearing ‘a white waistcoat embroidered with gold’ and ‘a shirt-frill of English lace, yellow with age, the magnificence of which a queen might have envied’. Then the face: ‘That dark face was full of angles and furrowed deep in every direction; the chin ...”

“... Acker had her hair bleached and buzz-cut and further divided into roughly razored squares. She’s wearing something black and hairy, with clanking hardware on ears and fingers and a tie like a noose round her neck. Her answers are straightforward, well formed, uncompromising but charming, with something indescribably touching in their delivery, like she’s ...”

“... such devices, had in this instance failed. At the time of the blast, Guardsman Wakefield was wearing standard body armour, which provides protection to the front and back of the torso. Projectiles entered his neck and upper chest, the latter through the unprotected side area of his vest. A forensic pathologist later said the neck injury severed one of ...”

“... inexplicably, the wandering right hand of Chico, whom they had long since written off. Harpo, wearing a fruit-covered hat, plucked an apple and an orange, Chico dodged and hurled them back, somebody lowered the curtain and the three Marx Brothers were four. Show business is full of incongruities. Gummo, drafted into the Army and told by Minnie that they ...”