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“... In June 1999, a housewife and mother of three was pulled over by the police at a stop sign in St Paul’s, Minnesota and addressed by a name she hadn’t used for 25 years. Kathleen Ann Soliah had been a member of the Symbionese Liberation Army, the revolutionary group that kidnapped and supposedly converted the newspaper heiress Patty Hearst ...”

“... for long enough about feminism, deconstruction and literary theory. The term may have been coined by Stephen Greenblatt in an essay of 1982; if so it was already a restrike, minted from a prototype used by Wesley Morris in 1972 or perhaps by Roy Harvey Pearce in 1958. Greenblatt himself ...”

“... Lamartine winced at his cynical promotion of self-interest, and for Rousseau the method employed by the fox to relieve the crow of its cheese was as much an advertisement for flattery as a warning against flatterers. But though they mistook his observations of human behaviour for universal precepts, La Fontaine must take some of the blame. He was an awkward ...”

“... It’s a broad enough definition, in all conscience, though it has begun to do some useful work by excluding a wide variety of short fiction in prose, and some long poems, such as Eugene Onegin or Vikram Seth’s The Golden Gate, which are not quite prepared to admit to being long poems. But it may be too broad. Forster ...”

“... victorious in battle like a Maccabee . . . he ruled mighty in arms; now in heaven let him be a king. So (in translation) run the verses around the tomb of Edward III in Westminster Abbey, erected soon after his death in 1377. Edward, the initiator of the Hundred Years War, the victor of Sluys and Crécy, the conqueror of Calais, achieved legendary ...”

“... more tropical in its associations. If the city is where readers of these books are most often to be found, the books themselves tend to be set in the village and the jungle, as in the exemplary magical-realist ‘world novel’, Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), which was written in one ...”

“... as far afield as Boston, Massachusetts promised to carry as much about the affair ‘as is fit to be printed’. Hundreds of songs and poems appeared, including, in London, the hilariously awful ‘Spiritual Amours’. Its author, a certain ‘Jeremy Jingle’, had no love lost for That compound of a goatish Lecher And a most edifying Preacher … To him ...”

“... will very nearly prove fatal. Since Cairo is Peter Lorre at his most flamboyant, you would have to be quite far gone in self-congratulation not to notice him. Spade has failed to understand that a corridor is less a space than a channel of communication through which people, things and messages pass in both directions. Mind the traffic.Roger Luckhurst’s ...”

“... So the span of William Mann’s well-researched dual biography is some 115 years. But a case can be made that the ‘greatest love affair’ promised by Mann amounted to no more than 216 minutes in the busy years of the mid-1940s. That’s the combined duration of To Have and Have Not (1944) and The Big Sleep (1946), two ...”

“... off, ‘running like a real peasant girl, pushing everyone who got in my way, getting pushed by people who would have stepped aside for me if they had seen me in my fine clothes’. For Manon, a middle-class girl who a few years later would become known as Madame Roland, the politically active wife of a minister in the French Revolutionary ...”

“... your defeats are only a success the less. In this unequal struggle, our good fortune is not to be losers; and your misfortune, not to be gainers.’ In 1783, the year after the novel appeared, Laclos wrote a manifesto, left unpublished until the 20th century, which called on women to effect a radical transformation of ...”

“... sentence of up to five years. In public discourse, this official colour blindness is justified by the enlightened universalisme of French republican values, and contrasted with Anglo-American communautarisme, a word which has a connotation similar to that of apartheid in English. A world devoid of racial or ethnic distinctions – distinctions which have ...”

“... the British military establishment and the new government in Washington, a town presided over by another John/Jack the lad. Profumo’s go-getting reputation and unstuffy demeanour made him attractive to the men around JFK, who liked that he didn’t seem like a typical Brit, never mind a typical Tory. He was extremely sociable, and well suited to the ...”

“... That production dates from 1755, the year before Gillray was born. His father, a blacksmith by trade, had served in the army for a decade and lost his right arm in 1745 in a battle against the French at Fontenoy. Reference to this mutilation, a perpetual reminder of the horrors of war, would show up sometimes overtly but also ...”

“... workers’. The first issue of Partisan Review, which appeared in February 1934, was produced by the New York branch of the JRC. ‘Through our specific literary medium,’ the editors wrote,we shall participate in the struggle of the workers and sincere intellectuals against imperialist war, fascism, national and racial oppression, and for the abolition ...”