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“... town with the hill and the old castle above it in a cup in the hills with the mountains beyond, brown mountains with a little green on their slopes. Both writers, as it happens, are writing about Italy. Both writers use one word three times (‘green’ for Hemingway, ‘primroses’ for Lawrence), and repeat two other words. Hemingway’s passage is ...”

“... tense – ‘every day she fried liver in a pan, which spat and sizzled and smelled rich and brown and oily’ – as if the mental work involved in examining a past instant has extended it until it occupies an unending amount of time. He is also relatively unexercised by the question of where and when he might have lived in his apartment block. It ...”

“... strongman squatting on my bed. He sees me too; from beneath his shaggy brow he rolls a liquid eye. Brown-skinned, naked except for the tattered hide of some endangered species, he is bouncing on his heels and smoking furiously without taking the cigarette from his lips: puff, bounce, puff, bounce. What rubbish, I think, actually shouting at myself, but ...”

“... poem is Falconet’s equestrian statue of Peter the Great in St Petersburg. It was ordered by Catherine the Great (Petro primo Catharina secunda). Modelled on the statue of Marcus Aurelius in Rome, it was meant to evoke the wise emperor extending a main protectrice. Joseph de Maistre commented that one doesn’t know whether this hand protects or ...”

“... Melody (1955), for which she won the Academy Award. The Library also possesses the papers of Catherine Turney, another prominent screenwriter, whose good friend, 87-year-old Gloria Stuart, of Titanic fame, has been here for lunch. Turney wrote women’s pictures for Bette Davis, Joan Crawford, Ida Lupino, Rosalind Russell and Ann Sheridan, and her script ...”

“... understand why any female artist would settle for a lesser realm. As her latest biographer, Catherine Hewitt, writes: ‘Rosa never called for equality; she ensured that her work earned her that right.’Where did this sense of exceptional vocation come from? Most historians have stressed the influence exercised by her father, the portraitist Raimond ...”

“... A raised stage, three metres long, about a metre high, is dressed with a flimsy backdrop of beige, brown, grey; here and there are torn swatches of yellow, green and maroon. At first we seem to see an austere Kurt Schwitters collage from the early 1920s. Close up, we discover unadorned cardboard, plain or coloured card. The wings of the stage are decorated ...”

“... Thatcherism becomes a “wasm”, everyone will wonder what all the fuss was about,’ Gordon Brown was still quipping in the LRB in 1989). The Leninists to the left of Labour, meanwhile, were looking at history as a ‘series of repeats’ – crisis, general strike, Winter Palace, here we come – although history suggests that the ‘sharpening of ...”

“... I am probably one of the 20 people in America who know his name. His appointment, like that of Catherine Ashton, the EU’s new High Representative for Foreign Affairs, is a catastrophe. It’s often said that Europe will continue to be unable to translate its economic power and its very big and positive institutional example into political power in the ...”

“... of scope for voluntary help and personal self-reliance.’ Lansbury begins by describing the Brown Dog riots of 1907. Medical students tried to damage a Battersea monument to a brown dog that had been vivisected in 1903 while the wound from an earlier experiment was as yet unhealed; the students thought suffragettes ...”

“... not that of his predecessor, Gina Haspel. Perhaps it would be too torture-heavy to be published.Catherine Ashton’s memoir offers neither brutal candour nor aristocratic irony. Instead, she aspires to sincerity. Ashton, like Pompeo, wasn’t a professional diplomat: hers was a typical New Labour career. After a youthful dalliance with the CND, she was ...”

“... children scavenging for things to sell. Around 1860, a 13-year-old Irish boy, ‘dressed in a brown fustian coat and vest, dirty greasy canvas trousers roughly-patched, striped shirt with the collar folded down and a cap with a peak’, told Henry Mayhew that he and his younger brother spent their days gathering lumps of coal, iron rivets, bits of ...”

“... late Elizabethan doublet with an unusual semi-transparent lace collar. He has fashionably shortish brown hair, a fairly high forehead, bags under his eyes as if he hasn’t been sleeping well lately, and a lightweight, almost fluffy beard and moustache. The top right-hand corner of the painting gives a date – 1603, perfectly consonant with the clothes, the ...”

“... larger-than-life theatricality of its anecdotes and style. The episode when Charke, alias ‘Mr Brown’, becomes the ‘unhappy object of love’ in a young heiress worth 40,000 pounds is told with all the finesse of a comedy of manners. Even tiny details, like the hungry cur which runs off with her last string of sausages, are recounted with a histrionic ...”

“... and imaginative truth in the book’s narrative design, the ‘series of memories’ which Catherine, the narrator, selects to ‘form a picture of my whole life’. Her understated ambition is realised in the story of her unexpected (but not outlandish) romance, her shocking (but not extraordinary) bereavement, her surprising (but not ...”