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“... citadel, vaunt and joust. Anyone who hesitates near me, these days, has to read me a chapter of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. I am considering adding knight errant to the profession of railway guard. Knight errant means knight wanderer, but I also think it means knight who has made a mistake. Mistakes are made all the time; it is a human ...”

“... artist – sometimes, like himself, they seem smaller than a mastiff, sometimes larger than their King and Queen; and these perspectives release them from the indignity of their normal social selves. A Keats poem too may have liberating perspectives. The ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ is much liked by most people who read any poetry at all, yet it is not obvious ...”

“... to publish. ‘My book problems are complicated and I would like to ask your advice,’ he told Christopher Ricks. ‘My new book is a small one, some eighty poems … the story of changing marriages, not a malice or sensation, far from it, but necessarily, according to my peculiar talent, very personal. Lizzie is naturally very much against it. I am ...”

“... fl. four million BC, ‘archaeological hoax’). Then comes Leir or Lear (supp. fl. c.820 BC, ‘king of Britain’), followed by several other equally doubtful types whose inclusion prompts the thought that although subjects must be dead to merit inclusion, there is no equally stringent requirement about having lived in the first place; even some very dodgy ...”

“... and people drop their hard-earned cash into his plastic cup. For dirty, greasy-haired Dave, 19, is king of the hard-faced professional beggars working Central London.’These reports – with their penny-dreadful conflation of begging with theft, social security fraud and gang-violence – have taken their toll in public wariness. People are increasingly ...”

“... when they invoked his right to publish a book that could elicit a plausible charge of blasphemy. Christopher Hitchens spoke early and courageously on those lines. ‘Behind the use of bleating words like “offensive”,’ he wrote in his Nation column on 13 March 1989, ‘one can sense abject trahison: the ecumenicism of the philistines’; as for ...”

“... been studying philosophy, tweets: ‘TRUTH IS A FORCE OF NATURE!’*The director of the FBI, Christopher Wray, earlier told the Judiciary Committee that ‘Russians are absolutely intent on trying to interfere with our elections’ in the future, and Mueller says: ‘It wasn’t a single attempt. They’re doing it as we sit here.’ A report by the ...”

“... new fact or surprising interpretation. I went back to an earlier biography from my Bowie shelf – Christopher Sandford’s Bowie: Loving the Alien (1996) – to compare a page or two, and found I couldn’t put it down. Sandford is especially good on Bowie in the 1980s and 1990s. He deals with all the stuff that fancier or more fanciful authors wouldn’t ...”

“... bully boy, reputed to be the toughest kid in the park, and with a title to boot, something like ‘king’ or ‘prince’, along those lines. My brother went out of his way to find the boy, who was sitting against a tree surrounded by admirers, and said something provocative to him, and as the kid made ready to stand up, my brother hammered him, snapping the ...”

“... just raping to raping and murdering.’Ted Bundy was responsible for more than thirty murders; Christopher Wilder abducted twelve women and girls in 1984 and killed eight of them. The prosecution psychologist suggested not only that Gordon would do it again, but that there was no proof he hadn’t done it before. In her statement, the victim asked the ...”

“... to her relationship with the subject, a close friend whom for many years she knew and admired – Christopher Sykes on Waugh is the nearest parallel? In such cases, affection can shape the compass of a biography, personal knowledge lighting up but also limiting what can be said. Perhaps there are traces of that here; but, on the whole, in the warmth and grace ...”

“... that day so they went there and met up with their friend Muna Ali. They all went to Falafel King afterwards to have lemonade. They just sat at the window watching the world go by, and they discussed Ramadan. Naseem promised to come to Grenfell Tower so they could break their fast together and make her famous cheese pie. ‘It had been such a big iftar ...”

“... like that.’ ‘And how did that change?’ Ramona said a single word: ‘Rob.’ The days in St Christopher Place were almost languorous. We would bring coffee back to the flat and spread out, and I’d try to build a picture of how he did what he said he did. We put up whiteboards and he bamboozled me with maths. Sometimes he would write at the board for ...”