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“... Fuzzy and Jean at school, Miss Educated in Seacliff psychiatric hospital, Waldo to the writer Frank Sargeson, Janetta in Ibiza. Then there was what people said about her: she was dirty, a thief, shy, different, an aspiring poet, ‘a lovely girl, no trouble at all’, officially insane, ‘pleasant to the guests at all times’, the ‘niece who is going ...”

“... In fact, in 1978, the year after Lowell’s death, Blackwood posted them to Lowell’s friend Frank Bidart in Boston. Bidart, Saskia Hamilton writes, ‘put the envelope under his bed, and later transferred it to the Houghton Library in Harvard, with a cover note stating that “This packet of letters belongs to the Estate of Robert Lowell, not to ...”

“... everything himself.’ Freedom in Dostoevsky is the freedom to be confused, and there is a close relation between his method and the consciousness that ‘if God does not exist, all is permitted.’ The author has apparently ceased to function as God. The character and the reader have together taken over from him, in a relationship that is bound to be ...”

“... childhood, Before the Storm (published in London in 1943), Maisky gives a vivid description of a close, earnest, socially-conscious family, atheist but within an Orthodox cultural tradition, an epitome of the progressive intelligentsia that read Shakespeare and Schiller as well as Herzen and Chernyshevsky and, as teachers, doctors and sometimes ...”

“... I finish my A-levels. I read the Reverend Richard Wurmbrand’s Tortured for Christ, and Frank Morison’s Who Moved the Stone? I read Nicky Cruz’s Run, Baby, Run, and books by Charles Colson, books which are still in print years after their first publication, Christian megasellers. I also spent a lot of time in prayer, and in daydreams. I was ...”

“... It seemed to me like a premonition of Esther as she is now. I could make no sense of the image up close; the marks defied all conventions. It was a portrait that shouldn’t add up. I fell asleep with the book in my lap, trying to work out where in the dense, rackety lines the likeness lay.The following evening I bumped into Esther in person. On another ...”

“... be a lot – will come, not from the uneconomic pits which the Coal Board is rightly determined to close, but from the new pits – the Selbys and Belvoirs – that it is anxious to develop. The second proposition on which the case for subsidising uneconomic pits rests is that there is no alternative employment in many of the mining areas: better that the men ...”

“... weekends spent playing chess continually, his father winning every time: Only once did I come close to beating him. He’d had some cocktails, and he blundered, moving his queen into the path of my knight. I sacked the piece, and he slapped me on the mouth. I ran into the bathroom and punched myself several times to ensure a lasting bruise. When I ...”

“... and folksy, but the family lived in a modernist house designed by an uncle who had studied with Frank Lloyd Wright. Russell was named for his father, with whom he seems to have had a fractious but intensely close relationship; an ex-girlfriend remembers being surprised that even in his early twenties Russell still ...”

“... Lanvin and Valentino. Over the course of his career, Enninful has built a remarkable number of close relationships with the rich, famous and powerful.With so many people moving freely between the two sides of the business, the line between advertising and editorial is, to put it mildly, pretty blurred. It’s ads, not subscriptions or newsstand sales, that ...”

“... taking any more initiatives; that his relations with the occupying powers had been suspiciously close; and that he would probably save up any weapons dropped to him to impose a Serb hegemony once the Allies had won the war. Tito, on the other hand, was at least known to be fighting. He was undeterred by German retaliation, which he rightly gauged as being ...”

“... back-to-basics language, in which people of same-sex desire are portrayed as members of a family, close community or tribe. It is an unfortunate but probably inevitable side-effect of campaigning for equal rights that homosexuals have had to prove that they are not only able to fulfil the responsibilities of citizenship but, absurdly, are better able to do so ...”

“... landscape: this is what Johnny Foreigner is doing, take it or leave it. That’s what shows in Frank O’Hara’s great poem of 1959, ‘The Day Lady Died’, when he buys himself a hamburger and a malted and ‘an ugly NEW WORLD WRITING to see what the poets / in Ghana are doing these days’. Subsequently, foreign titles had something of the status of ...”

“... and he certainly tried to follow his own precept – ‘if the picture is no good you are not close enough.’ But Whelan’s book does make you re-run the great World War Two pictures in your head, and wonder what they tell you about that war. Capa had something of the amoral charm of Thomas Mann’s Felix Krull: ‘It is a favourite theory of ...”

“... Hitchcock’s thriller, on the television, with stringy, frightening music and a wooden plot. I close my eyes but cannot go to sleep. Should I give up business and return to the ‘little’ author I was in Suffolk for almost ten years while working on Monty? Philip Ziegler and others have written kindly about the final Monty volume, hoping that I will not ...”