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“... according to Tim Heald, her latest biographer, who has previously committed to paper the lives of Brian Johnston,2 Denis Compton,3 Barbara Cartland4 and Prince Philip,5like the other four biographical subjects she was also a household word in her day. This had nothing to do with hard work and natural ability – as, I would argue, it did in the other four ...”

“... on a tide of caffeine, the subject is too important to be left to historians of food and drink. Brian Cowan is a political and social historian, but The Social Life of Coffee is systematically sceptical about Habermas’s claims. True, Charles II made a serious – if ultimately unsuccessful – attempt to suppress coffee houses towards the end of 1675, and ...”

“... Great Famine became morbid nostalgia. One of the half-dozen best Irish plays of the 20th century, Brian Friel’s Translations, evoked a few well-bred sneers from the Dublin literati for being set in 19th-century Irish-speaking Donegal. The play also takes the odd swipe at the British, which in liberal middle-class Irish circles is equivalent to cavorting ...”

“... Aline of brightly painted stone cottages, out there at the end of the world, beyond Allihies in West Cork. The cottages have been extensively tampered with, knocked through, until they form a single unit, set square to the prevailing on-shore winds. The occupier, New York-born to a childhood in John Cheever commuting country, now reinvented as a Vietnam-vintage Irish citizen, removes all the offending oil paintings from the wall: jewelled landscapes in oil; lively, naive renderings of the headland on which the cottages have been built ...”

“... Canadian bank and insurance company had to have its head office there. But some of these imposing stone buildings are now to let. Montreal’s relative decline (and Toronto’s rise) has been accelerated during the last generation by an exodus of increasingly apprehensive Anglophone institutions. Political uncertainty has hastened the flight of ...”

“... But the words were said by Barry Humphries in the persona of the ruminating convalescent Sandy Stone, and in the Australian context they are not surreal. They are real. Every Australian, even if he lives in Sydney’s Point Piper or Melbourne’s Toorak, has at some time or other found snails in the letterbox. When you step outside on a dark and dewy ...”

“... informative when we are given a living context for the artefacts. The most exquisitely chipped stone arrowhead is better appreciated if we know something of the life of its maker. The always perceptive reader of the London Review of Books will have detected desperation in the preceding attempt to justify this review of a spoilt, petulant anti-semite whose ...”

“... reflection.As if the cairnstone could defy the cairn.As if the eddy could reform the pool.As if a stone swirled under a cascade,Eroded and eroding in its bed,Could grind itself down to a different core.Then I thought of the tribe whose dances never failFor they keep dancing till they sight the deer.The ‘Station Island’ sequence forms the middle section of ...”

“... with some time stoppages if the weighman thought the tub was on the heavy side and that a bit of stone had been added.In addition to what we could earn by the ton, we were paid a graduated rate for tramming, depending on the distance. For the first 40 yards, we got nothing. For the next 25 yards we were paid a penny a tub, and then for every 30 yards an ...”

“... States, and, post-Lolita, in Montreux. Disposing of Andrew Field, his predecessor in the field, Brian Boyd cites his insolent, perfunctory response to one of Nabokov’s factual corrections. Told an event had taken place in July and not on ‘a wet autumnal day’, Field emended the phrase to ‘a wet autumnal day in July’ – a covert imputation and ...”

“... mortels.’ To believe that one’s soul dies is just as delusional as to believe that one is God. Brian Boyd, in his splendid two-volume biography, links this story with another, ‘Signs and Symbols’, written in 1948. An aged couple try to visit their hopelessly insane son in an asylum to give him a birthday present, but he has attempted suicide for the ...”

“... informers.3. But the imminent (and illegal in Stormont eyes) march posed a particular problem for Brian Faulkner. Derry shelters some of the most bigoted and reactionary of all Orangemen: what Nuremberg was to the Nazis, Londonderry the Maiden City is to the Orange militants and die-hard Unionists.A particularly noisy group, led by a Protestant ...”

“... the first time. During 11 long days at the Old Bailey, luck was with us. Ponting’s solicitor, Brian Raymond, was resourceful. Merlyn Rees agreed to be a witness, and most effective he was. The jury was taken aback when Mr Heseltine’s Civil Service Private Secretary, Richard Mottram, casually revealed, to the incredulity of Ponting’s counsel and the ...”

“... about faith-healing, it was turned down by the studios for whom it was written. The actress Sharon Stone had acquired the property, which she claimed to have discovered by her own ‘detective work’: in fact, ‘Jacob’s Hands’ had been known about at least since Brian Finney’s 1979 biography. Film rights were sold ...”

“... fine. This is where you feel slightly homosexual and left-wing if you don’t weigh twenty-five stone.’ Reagan is greeted with laughter, applause, cheers and whoops; the whooping seems to be a new development, but a mere supplement to the laughter, which doesn’t ‘express high spirits or amusement but a willed raucousness’. Another thing they do with ...”