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“... sight, all I ever feared was what might tap my shoulder in the dark.’ Thinking back to this, one foot in the neon slop, the other hoiked on the bar-rail, it came to me in a rush, along with my third or fourth pick-me-up, that what Sandy had said that day was not ‘dearth’ but ‘death’, a thought I chased to the mirror behind the bar and there he ...”

“... The life of Harry Smith is one episode in Tippins’s Epic of Everyone, even people who never set foot in the insalubrious lobby of the Chelsea. Her narrative method is best described as ‘associative garrulous’, her story spun across ever-extending degrees of separation. The shuttle is whirring, the temperature’s rising, everybody’s at the party, and ...”

“... the Earth – and countless giants, including a fire giant with a giant flaming sword. As in John of Patmos’s vision, the sun blackens and the stars fall out of the sky. In the Islamic version, the vicious cannibals of Yajuj and Majuj (Gog and Magog in the Old Testament) go on a killing spree, the Beast of the Earth appears – a monster with feet like ...”

“... unmatched: the tallest giraffe ever recorded, a Masai bull, measured 19.3 feet. The explorer John Mandeville only mildly exaggerated when he wrote of the ‘gerfauntz’, in the first English-language account in 1356, that it had a neck ‘twenty cubytes long [about thirty feet] … he may loken over a gret high hous.’ (As Mandeville is himself a ...”

“... When, in 1682, the Reverend Mr Busby, headmaster of Westminster School, expelled or suspended John Dryden’s son, the poet wrote him an excellent letter. Busby had already been at Westminster for more than forty years: he was that terrifying thing, a Great Headmaster. Moreover, Dryden had himself been among his pupils and knew well enough what tricks the old autocrat could get up to ...”

“... for love. To recover his lost wits, his comrade-in-arms Astolfo travels to the Moon, guided by St John the Evangelist. On the Moon all that is lost on Earth can be found. The favours of princes show up as inflated bellows, ladies’ charms as limed snares; lost wits are stored in individually labelled bottles. There, in a palace by the River Lethe, the Fates ...”

“... enjoyed the public-school master Mountgrace-church MacDiarmid’s taste in literature: Selected John Ashbery, Schuyler, O’Hara, Gravity’s Rainbow, and End as a Man, Young Torless, Cavafy and others bizarrer, Lord Weary, Das Schloss, Lady Windermere’s Fan ... The nymphomaniac pensioners in ‘The Sexy Old Ladies of Havergo Hall’ are less ...”

“... was the story of a woman’s life as a house slave on the North Carolina plantation of John Hill Wheeler, her escape to New Jersey in 1857, and her composition of an autobiographical fiction incorporating ‘elements of the many sentimental sagas she had evidently borrowed from Mr Wheeler’s shelf’. Although ‘replete with the heavy-handed ...”

“... for fresh marches of conquest. The ensuing adventures were narrated with devastating flatness by John Hemming in The Search for El Dorado. The gold-hunters got lost, ate grubs, grass and one another, were plagued by bugs and vampires, swelled or shrivelled or turned orange, devoured sweaty saddles in fits of salt-thirst, perished of ...”

“... who she described as ‘a small man, not much smaller than Napoleon. He limped because of a club foot, as did Byron. Very clever, he got a scholarship to Heidelberg where he acquired his doctorate.’ Lady Mosley burbled on in this vein for a bit, spicing things up with references to Goebbels’s ‘inspired oratory’. Concerning Kristallnacht she was ...”

“... the future. There is more to his renewed fame than mere politics. Churchill always had one foot in the realm of popular culture. From youth onwards he was a best-selling writer in the categories of war, travel and adventure. The Second World War turned him into a movie star, prompting him to remark in 1942 that he had already sold the film rights of ...”

“... as a setting for sculpture are the consequences of a single-minded pursuit by its main architect, John Russell Pope, of its underlying purpose, which was to provide a famous dealer in need of respectability, Lord Duveen, with a chance to display his munificence on a colossal scale. So the space seems designed to diminish any person or thing that enters ...”

“... first ruling queen, and one to whom England had violently objected before he had even set foot there. In 1553, Mary Tudor, Henry VIII’s first-born daughter, had acceded to the throne following the death of Henry’s teenage son, Edward VI. As fervently Catholic as Edward had been Protestant, Mary was determined to restore papal supremacy in ...”

“... to show fear at the time of the earthquake, no one would have held it against her. To step foot in the Travellers Club as a non-male, on the other hand, was a gaffe that couldn’t be allowed to pass. She was ‘politely but firmly shown the door’. For anyone who came of age in Britain during and directly after the war, pluck was part of the national ...”

“... into the drawer. She and Kafka were practically twins. Like her, he suffered badly from Who Foot Is That, like her he was dying from I Am What I’m Looking At syndrome, yet he was able to go to cabarets – every night it sometimes seemed – and observe the red knees of the girls. ‘So good. A major classic,’ she had told a friend in high school ...”