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“... with the Light Brown Hair, the lost one ‘who comes not again’. The big Romantics all had their more portentous versions, from Lucy ceasing to be, to Shelley’s solipsistic sad heart, filled with grief ‘but with delight/No more, oh nevermore’. Poe’s sardonic raven enunciated ‘Nevermore’ as a standard ...”

“... wants it or they’ll die. In order to accommodate this novel notion of deluxe, Dana Thomas, in her startling and richly informative book, draws a line between luxury and ‘the luxury industry’: The luxury industry has changed the way people dress. It has realigned our economic class system. It has changed the way we interact. It has become ...”

“... In his lifetime an unyielding critic of priestcraft and superstition, Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) stands today at the heart of a cult which has been variously described as America’s ‘civil religion’, ‘the religion of the Republic’ and ‘American Shinto’. As individuals and families, Americans worship their own gods, or, more commonly, God in their own way: but collectively, as citizens, they learn the creed, and participate in the rituals of a sacralised American Way of Life ...”

“... In his lifetime his reputation was high, but Sir Thomas Lawrence was scarcely buried – with great pomp in the crypt of St Paul’s – before the feeling spread that his work had more brilliance than substance. Victorians, who disliked the morals and manners of the leaders of Regency society, found them reflected in Lawrence’s frequently showy pictures of the men, their wives, their mistresses and their children – legitimate and otherwise ...”

“... an elliptical novel can subside dolefully into a series of flat notes. Of the two, Wrinkles is the more original and interesting. It consists of forty-odd biographical sketches, each about three pages in length, of an unnamed middle-aged man. Each moves from childhood through maturity to old age, beginning in the past tense as a record of fact and ending in ...”

“... 860 people; currently there are about 1200. The number of guards has been cut and prisoners are more often locked in their cells. The detective voted for Brexit, not because he is pro or anti-Europe, more to throw a spanner into the works. He said he rents his home. The younger officers he works with own theirs, and in ...”

“... from a river in a spray of high-definition slow-motion droplets, stags rutting in a shallow river (more spray), dolphins racing through shafts of underwater sunlight, an otter likewise, a puffin defending its catch of eels from a black-headed gull, a murmuration of starlings swirling through the evening skies – gives way to a few seconds of satellite footage ...”

“... he sucks a stone’ – he passes the time by killing and robbing a Shetlander who won’t buy him more than one drink, and beating, raping and murdering a nine-year-old ‘nigger boy’. Not one of the good guys then. Or, as McGuire puts it, ‘this courtyard has become a place of vile magic, of blood-soaked transmutations, and Henry Drax is its wild, unholy ...”

“... observable organism with a complex biological and social history and a name. But to yourself, more intimately, you appear as ‘I’, the mental subject of your experiences, thoughts, feelings, memories and emotions. This inner self is only indirectly observable by others, though they ordinarily have no doubt about its existence, as you have no doubt ...”

“... and early 1590s, the so-called ‘pre-Shakespearean’ period. Not a single play by the sonneteer Thomas Watson remains, though he was described in 1592 as one whose ‘daily practyse and living’ was writing for the theatre. Thomas Nashe certainly wrote for the public playhouses in the early 1590s – his friend Greene ...”

“... gain such a benefit from any other chance, and this cannot be measured by tens of years but rather more than that.Osama bin Laden, March 1997Once, the Kabul Zoo housed ninety varieties of animals and got a thousand visitors a day, but in the era of fighting that followed the fall of the Soviets and then of Najibullah, the people stayed away, and the animals ...”

“... in 1954. The roads were bad, there wasn’t much food and it was almost impossible to get more than a transit visa. A few intrepid sorts went to Dubrovnik and stayed in designated hotels, but that was all. So my father, William Woods, decided we should go. He was struggling to finish his novel Manuela (later made into a film, with Trevor Howard in the ...”

“... nerd with bad skin who still lives with his (ill, possessive) mother. They’re all QPR fans; all more or less thirty. Every year, without fail, the four of them celebrate 14 August, the anniversary of a perfect (in their collective memory, anyway) day they spent together in 1984, ‘halfway through the last summer we were together at school’. But in 1998 ...”

“... only a writer of very High Modernist tendencies would take this remark as a compliment, but Thomas Mann certainly did, and it wasn’t even addressed to him. He found it in Harry Levin’s little book on Joyce, which he read in 1944. He was also much drawn to another sentence in the same work: ‘The best writing of our contemporaries is not an act of ...”

“... that ‘the terrorists … would not survive.’ The deaths of the talented gunmen shouldn’t be more regrettable than those of their more ordinary comrades, but they are because the story has paid more attention to them all along. The novel confuses two different injustices here: on the ...”