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“... of the diaspora, of ‘Russia Abroad’, that strange in-between place where, as Semyon Frank said, one had to ‘live and breathe in a vacuum’.‘Zhivago’, in the pre-revolutionary genitive case, means ‘the living one’. On the novel’s first page a hearse is being followed to the grave. ‘Whom are you burying?’ the mourners are ...”

“... than anyone else currently writing to give up, putting them in the position of the narrator of Thomas Bernhard’s The Loser, who hears Glenn Gould play and realises that although he is gifted enough as a performer to attend the same piano masterclass in Salzburg, there is simply no point in making any more efforts in that line. He gives away his Steinway ...”

“... constant discussion and enquiry and it was a topic on which, while not boastful, Dudley was always frank, informative and very funny. That Dudley, given the chance, could talk illuminatingly about music was brought home to me in almost the only conversation I had with him about jazz, when he explained the difference, as he saw it, between a good and an average ...”

“... made deep incursions into the territory of English letters, pruning all rhetorical exuberance with frank impiety. He needed Joyce to be Irish; he needed a mentor to be remote from the centre and thus to be a writer who would, by necessity, break moulds; it could somehow justify Argentina and its terrible distance from where life or letters began. Flann ...”

“... death in the Northampton General Lunatic Asylum, Frederick Martin, a former amanuensis of Thomas Carlyle, published the first biography of the ‘peasant poet’. It laid the foundations, Jonathan Bate says in his new Life, ‘for both the enduring myths and some of the key truths about Clare’. Though there have been other biographies since ...”

“... back story, a baleful one, sheds some light here, both on the vicissitudes of the career and the frank titillations of style. Like other taboo-breaking writers – D.H. Lawrence and Sylvia Plath come to mind – Hutchins seems to have written for some fairly unpleasant emotional reasons, and the wish to mortify her nearest and dearest was no doubt among ...”

“... and of the headmastership of James Prince Lee, a future bishop of Manchester and a disciple of Thomas Arnold, whose educational ideals – the strenuous pursuit of knowledge and the cultivation of elevated tone and Christian character – Edward was to perpetuate in his own career. When he was still a student at Cambridge in 1850 his mother and eldest ...”

“... rather than just ‘I believe’ says all that needs to be said. ‘To be honest’ another of his frank-seeming phrases.11 June. Why isn’t more fuss made over Charles Causley? Looking through his Collected Poems to copy out his ‘Ten Types of Hospital Visitor’ I dip into some of his other poems, so many of them vivid and memorable. Well into his ...”

“... promise and the caveat were one and the same. If psychoanalysis is ‘a testimonial science’, in Frank Cioffi’s words, a world without witness, whose crucial scenes are played out in camera, then Freud’s word must be his bond. By the same token, he cannot easily be spoken for. And yet the biographers have never stopped speaking – for him, or against ...”

“... erotic humour … Finally, facetiousness, honest to its own failing.’ She is writing here about Thomas Mann). And she did it when she spoke, shifting pitch and tone and precise degree of suppressed hilarity: ‘You must eat orrrranges,’ when a student went down with a winter sniffle. ‘You must read Marianne Weber, then you will understand the ...”

“... decided to send a delegation to Russia to seek formal recognition. (It was also suggested that Thomas Johnston, leader of the Labour Party, should be one of its members.) The initial proposal had come from de Valera, writing to Griffith from Washington and suggesting that McCartan go to Russia as a delegate from the Dáil. The idea was to obtain ...”

“... designer gas Freon, properly chlorofluorocarbon (CFC), developed in 1930 by the American chemist Thomas Midgley for General Motors Frigidaire as a substitute for the poisonous liquid ammonia previously used in refrigerators. Freon is almost chemically inert, non-poisonous; it boils at room temperature. It did a great job in the air conditioners that were ...”

“... is also the best means of establishing a controversy.’ Or, as the Republican pollster Frank Luntz put it in a memo to party activists during W.’s first midterms, ‘Should the public come to believe that the scientific issues are settled, their views about global warming will change accordingly. Therefore, you need to continue to make the lack ...”

“... of what precedes or comes after it. Its heroine is a servant, Félicité, one of the excluded whom Frank O’Connor invoked in discussing the genre (‘the short story has never had a hero. What it has instead is a submerged population group’). Flaubert describes the arc of her life – a canvas as broad as a novel – with extreme concision. Large nuances ...”

“... But the three officers connected with these documents – Vernon Attwell, John Donaldson and Thomas Style – had signed witness statements in December 1974 stating that the manuscript notes were contemporaneous, and they had repeated this on oath in the trial in 1975. If the rough typed notes were indeed a draft from which the manuscript notes were ...”