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“... little public client and university appendage. As someone noted, a little gnomically (but it’s the truth), ‘Beckmann was time.’ He was successful early, painting John Martin-like catastrophes on a huge scale: visionary, awful, sandy things. The first monograph on him appeared before the First World War, when he was still in his twenties. In the ...”

“... because of a hope that Trump would nominate justices who would overturn Roe v. Wade, the court’s decision guaranteeing (at least in theory) women’s right to abortion.The gambit paid off. Trump filled Scalia’s seat with Justice Neil Gorsuch. Soon after, Justice Anthony Kennedy ...”

“... he called his ‘pet lamb’ – as her excuse for favouring my sister, saying that my father had so totally appropriated me, their first-born, with his adoration that, when they had a second child, she had no alternative to loving her more than he did and more than she did me. She was so blithely innocent about normal ...”

“... first three novels. The reasons for this, she speculated, were temperamental: It seemed he did so out of a kind of opposing desire to hold himself clear of events and their daily, grubby, tragic consequences in which, like everyone else living in South Africa, he is up to the neck, and about which he had an inner compulsion to write. ...”

“... too many times. That meant I would have to take the ferry, across the neck of one of the world’s largest natural harbours. After a jolting truck ride, I found myself at the edge of a concrete pier, watching the sun-set through the haze, waiting for the boat. Fishermen poled their pirogues onto the brown strip of beach. A ...”

“... nuns. It was a Time-Life edition with an embroidered cover by Leo and Diane Dillon, a cover so beautiful it stayed on the eye and swam over the yellowing pages. I read it till the spine cracked and never returned it; it is next to me right now. I only stole the books that baffled me, the ones I couldn’t seem to solve. She was born Lula Carson Smith in ...”

“... of the population had read at least one of the Astérix books; and by the time of Goscinny’s death total sales in France are said to have amounted to more than 55 million copies, putting Astérix substantially ahead of his main (Belgian) rival, Tintin. The first French space satellite, launched in 1965, was named in his honour (the US later matched ...”

“... 13 January. One of Peter Cook’s jokes, several times quoted in his obituaries, is of two men chatting. ‘I’m writing a novel,’ says one, whereupon the other says: ‘Yes, neither am I.’ And of course it’s funny and has a point, except that Peter, I suspect, felt that this disposed of the matter entirely ...”

“... it was assembled … Look at it here, flying on the page, vying with light.’ Behold, Werner’s sacramental tone urges, a saint’s relic, a fragment blessed with mystic powers, miraculously rising from the sacred site of the archive. The complex nature of this archive was well captured in 1945 by Millicent Todd Bingham ...”

“... Iraq and Palestine are inadequately subsumed in a chapter curiously entitled ‘Britain’s Informal Empire in the Middle East’. In the first volume, on Imperial ‘origins’, there are ground-breaking contributions from Jane Ohlmeyer on Ireland and Scotland as ‘laboratories of Empire’, and from Peter Mancall on the troubled relationship ...”

“... deciding to reject the easy joke; I was a tasteful person now, having passed through the refiner’s fire. 8 May. We had flown into LA from Savannah the night before; the city, from our hotel room, looked like a heat map of itself. The jacarandas were blooming. Everyone describes the jacarandas, but my husband, Jason, was seeing them for the first time, in ...”

“... In​ Transparency International’s most recent Corruption Perceptions Index, published in January, the UK fell to twentieth place, its lowest ever ranking. It’s not hard to see why: a Conservative government mired in allegations of corruption; billions of pounds in Covid contracts for politically connected VIPs; peerages doled out to Tory donors; public bodies stuffed with party cronies ...”

“... bliss. The first time I’ve been on a train without a nanny or a husband!’ Ariel’s language is a joy. About meeting Hitler she remarks: I was pregnant at the time so I wasn’t feeling very … brisk. Hitler said, “I only have four words in a foreign language,” the four words being: “Vous êtes mon ...”

“... that these details suggest, of exile and nostalgia, is more pertinent than the data of Agee’s education, employment, marriages. He enjoyed wide recognition and often enough he finished his projects. Yet the things he wished he could do – ‘a dozen Chekhov-Shakespeare novels’, as one of his editors, Robert Phelps, summarised a characteristic ...”

“... to be ignored, to tell us the prospectus, like the prospect, was a hoax. None of Joan Didion’s books has been long, exactly, not with the generous amounts of white space she provides, which serve as fresh linen and air conditioning after a day’s driving in the desert, some respite from the perils. But air ...”