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“... attained by psychical study.’ But this study has been tending to widen for him from the séance-room of ectoplasm and jingling tambourines to experiences of his own in common life. Thus his younger son Adrian has shown an apparently inexplicable awareness of something his elder son Denis has done in another ...”

“... He had his wife handle certain coke bottles in an empty six-pack while he was out of the room for a couple of minutes. Detection proved too easy: ‘As soon as you put the bottle near your face, you could smell it was dampish and warmer.’ So he had Mrs Feynman take down a book and replace it on the shelf: I came in – and nothing to it! It was ...”

“... a fiver. On one occasion, Guinness came home on leave to find Mother Courage had burgled his one-room flat and left a neat docket of pawn tickets on the mantelpiece. Readers of Blessings in Disguise may sometimes feel that the book is Hamlet without the Prince, but the publishers are at pains to point out that this is not ‘the exercise in egomania purveyed ...”

“... literature on this all-important topic – Sir William Chambers’s Architecture, for instance, or Adrian Stokes’s Stones of Rimini – does not feature among Rykwert’s two thousand volumes, and even Ruskin (who, for all his impetuous dismissal of the Greek and Roman styles, showed more understanding of their point than most of their defenders) is ...”

“... three children in three years – Henning only had to sneeze, she said, on the far side of the room for her to become pregnant – and endured the correct society of Berlin. Then she was transferred ninety miles away to Nasserheide, the Count’s vast derelict estate in Pomerania. It was there, during the blissful months of his absence on business, that ...”

“... at Gresham’s he is said to have spent as much time in the nets and at ping pong as in the music room playing piano duets, trios and quartets with his fortunate fellow pupils. He was also quite often sick, being especially vulnerable to ‘beastly colds’. About music Britten had, from very early days, strong opinions, to which the privacy of the diary ...”

“... hear the magic repeated,’ Deyan Sudjic writes – and I wish I had a serving hatch in my sitting room because then I’d feel properly middle class. Only yesterday, I debated with myself whether to buy a telephone table and set it up in the hall with a red telephone, like the one we had in 1977, the one that never rang until one day it did. My mother had got ...”

“... sicario, currently in hiding in the US, testifies anonymously in the documentary El Sicario: Room 164 that at the height of the conflict he had no idea which camp he was working for: he killed the people his superiors told him to kill, including his own comrades, without the faintest idea why or on whose ultimate behalf. As for the federales, it might be ...”

“... persons [who] can go back to normal life,’ the Chinese ambassador to the US said last November. Adrian Zenz, who by examining government documents has uncovered much about the logistics of Xinjiang’s ‘Strike Hard’ campaign, as well as the thinking behind it, believes that the internment drive has swept up as many as 1.5 million people, one in six of ...”

“... a ‘parade of individual “great” male artists or canonical masterpieces’. There can be no room in such a project for artists such as Anthony Devis, adjudged by Waterhouse to be ‘an altogether minor person’; or those whom it is ‘sufficient to mention’ but unnecessary to discuss; or the numerous and nameless ‘journeymen hacks’ who ‘cannot ...”

“... he suffers from anthologies, and his poetry is best browsed through. He made great friends with Adrian Bell, the country novelist who wrote Corduroy and became the first compiler of the Times crossword. Bell had a sharp but kindly eye for the Blunden ethos and personality, remarking that there was ‘something about the little man that made every woman who ...”

“... and they came out in an intoxicatingly uniform jumble, as if you were looking into the prop room of someone’s subconscious theatre. As the Cubists transformed all people and things into multifaceted geometrical solids, Crumb transformed all people and things into bulbous, anxious masses. Everything appears to have been electrocuted: the people, the ...”

“... instead a deep hatred and suspicion of the Russians on the one hand and the French on the other. Adrian Fort, in his new biography, argues persuasively that ‘on European matters a paramount influence upon Nancy seemed to be an aversion to the French’ and to ‘Latins in general’. As for the idea that she was organising conspiracies at Cliveden, Nancy ...”

“... Stein, in Alice B. Toklas mode, fauxnaive and paratactic, artless and kooky, the godmother of Adrian Mole. But his favourite art critic, as he admits in It Hurts, his book about the New York art scene, is Clement Greenberg, and he can suddenly throw out a shrewd, decisive insight in the master’s best manner. His claims on art’s behalf are modest and ...”

“... Once out of Russia, he followed Lenin across Europe and caught up with him in the Reading Room of the British Museum. In spite of the venue, he was not an intellectual but an organiser and fixer: he managed and distributed illicit publications and handled hot Russian money to fund the revolution. Ivy did occasional typing for him, and soon they were ...”