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“... keep a sizeable library in my locker (though my reading was not as highbrow as my fellow historian Peter Burke’s during his stint as a pay clerk in Singapore, which in a typical two days, Vinen tells us, included Galileo, Gide and Rimbaud). Although subject to weekly parades and periodic kit inspections, we were excused weapon training and most other ...”

“... A Practical Guide for Women by the punctuation-crazed Rita Freedman. Publishing houses in New York, busy, as usual, looking for the hot new writing talent, will expect to find it in the medical journals and at psychoanalytic conferences, such is the demand for quasi-medical books which tell you how to deal with life’s crapness. In the same way, editors ...”

“... theory and towards the frontiers being opened up by drugs and neurotransmitters. In 1959 Peter Tripp, a radio DJ in New York, decided to stay awake for two hundred hours to raise money for charity. Tripp set himself up in a glass booth in Times Square, monitored by sleep researchers, where he rapped and span ...”

“... had fabulous orange juice at that hotel.LeonieShe has one drooping eyelid and lives with Uncle Peter beside a big shallow lake. To swim you walk out miles. She tells me I had written all the lyrics of Joni Mitchell songs and in her dream sang them to her. Uncle Peter, once an architect, wears colour co-ordinated shirt ...”

“... I’d called an old friend, a photographer, James, who was with a bunch of colleagues from the New York Times in a farmhouse nearby. He’d said they could probably make room. So I call him again and he gives us directions. We find them a few minutes later, sitting on benches round a marble-topped table in a brightly lit courtyard, tapping away at ...”

“... the notes into the till. On other occasions the reporter flew first-class with his wife to New York for a New Year party and spent £10,000 in one day on furnishings. He spent £140,000 on restoring a yacht. He rented a gallery in central Hamburg as his personal museum. At one time or another he had been trusted with most of the £2,500,000 in bank notes ...”

“... until they were discredited in 1964, after massive crop failures). During the Sixties, in New York City, twins put up for adoption were separated and used for psychological studies under the direction of Peter Neubauer, who never told either them or their parents that they were twins, or that they were being studied. In ...”

“... in the original, or Kafka or Kierkegaard or studying Provençal. She adores music and when the New York Philharmonic is playing Hindemith she can tell you which one of the six bass viols came in a quarter of a beat too late. Khachaturian isn’t let off the hook either: ‘He called it a violin concerto. I called it a loose fan belt and the hell with ...”

“... leg of X or the endangered toe of Y, who has already lost a leg? Those are two of the variations Peter Singer puts forward on the exam question that used to ask whether, in a fire of just such severity as to let you rescue one and no more, you would plump for your grandparent, your grandchild or the Titian that so surprisingly shared houseroom with them. His ...”

“... not doubt that Mr McGregor, had he been blessed with children, would have read them The Tale of Peter Rabbit; and it is not hard to imagine someone still smiling over the enchanting Mrs Tittlemouse as they set a mousetrap. Why should we find it surprising that an art-lover in 1790 or so, who wept at a picture of an undernourished, ragged child gathering ...”

“... would have affected most people. At the same time, though Cambridge may once have plotted against York, and held troops in readiness outside Southampton, this sort of political intrigue is described as one might report today on a group of self-interested businessmen seeking to further their own fortunes by a little shady dealing. There is no hint of the ...”

“... rose to popular fame (and fortune) with his work on the gentle Mbuti and the abominable Ik, and Peter Brook added to his fame with the theatrical version of the latter (Les Iks, to be exact). Anthropologists were tolerant of The Forest People (1961) despite its naive romanticism, since it was an engaging account, which illustrated the role of the ...”

“... to John Leslie in Canada, to Derek Parfit, again in Oxford. He meets Roger Penrose in New York, has phone conversations with Steven Weinberg and John Updike. These conversations become a way of evoking possibilities as much as seeking answers, and some of these possibilities are fascinating, whatever our scepticism may be about the larger ...”

“... law and medicine. Prominent Lebanese Americans like Ralph Nader, Michael DeBakey, William Peter Blatty, Senator James Abourezk and General John Abizaid rarely visited Lebanon itself. As attached as some were to their grandmothers’ cooking and to bits of folklore, they preferred to keep the country at a distance. Anthony Shadid was an exception. As ...”

“... man in diapers!’). After a long absence he returns from his country retreat to New York, where he meets an old friend, Amy Bellette, mistress of the deceased novelist E.I. Lonoff. Amy has a brain tumour and is being pestered by a young man who wants to write Lonoff’s biography. He must be prevented, for biography is regarded as ‘a second ...”