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“... poem that he had read out at the end of the press conference occasioned by the award: The temple bell echoes the impermanence of all things ... Before long the mighty are cast down And are as dust before the wind. He was to the end clear-eyed and courageous. When he learned that he had multiple myeloma – the disease that eventually killed him – he ...”

“... The German word​ for ‘submerged’ is untergetaucht; it’s also the original title of Marie Jalowicz Simon’s memoir, which has been published in English as Gone to Ground. The term has come to be used of the 15,000 or so Jews who attempted to remain undiscovered in Nazi Germany during the war – they called themselves ‘U-Boats’. Half of them were in Berlin, and of those only 1700 would make it to the end of the war ...”

“... in two acquaintances, Amos Ratcliffe, a beautiful and prodigious teenager, and Amos’s landlord, Daniel Haws.Amos is open about his feelings for Daniel. ‘“I’m not ashamed to say it. I’m in love with Daniel Haws and I’m going to tell him … I testify to love on account of I ...”

“... At Cornhill in London, no goods were to be sold after Vespers (around 6 p.m.), marked by the bell of St Thomas the Martyr of Acon; Compline, struck on the bells of St Martin’s Le Grand, marked the closure of the taverns and the city curfew.Devotional attention to time encouraged the development of devices to measure it. The most ubiquitous instrument ...”

“... relics, including her ‘Gilbert original’, a handkerchief he’d covered with paint. It rings a bell: Catrine has been hoping for letters from Isabelle, the friend she’d had in America; it’s not clear where Isabelle is now, though there is the odd clue when Catrine thinks of her: ‘I can see the flamenco dancers kept in her mirror and the way ...”

“... contemporary novel, has been a mighty matter, looming large. Who will forget the narrator of The Bell Jar seeing an adult penis for the first time and being both fascinated and repelled? (‘The only thing I could think of was turkey neck and turkey gizzards and I felt very depressed.’) Or Fermina Daza, in a darkened room in García Márquez’s Love in ...”

“... bus.) To frame such scenes of fragmentation, Milov quotes her mentor, the intellectual historian Daniel Rodgers: in the late 20th century, he writes, accounts of human experience once ‘thick with context, social circumstance, institutions and history gave way to conceptions of human nature that stressed choice, agency, performance, desire’. The isolated ...”

“... characterful region. It calls up what it is to walk among moors of wind-shorn whin and rustling bell-heather, or to step down beyond the rim of Land’s End, to leave behind the shops full of plastic galleons and ‘gift’ mugs and clamber through buttresses fledged with hoary lichen. Marsden’s way is to walk off down a lane, catch sight of a standing ...”

“... professor of English? Can you talk Irish?’ He was overwhelmingly defeated for the job by Daniel Corkery, who had the same Republican credentials but a much more potent neo-Wagnerian ideology of race and nationality. When his rather innocuous book of stories Midsummer Night Madness was banned in Ireland in 1932 for being ‘in general tendency ...”

“... This is part of what made Apple different: the wild innovations of companies like Lockheed or Bell Labs married to the mass market design sensibility of Ikea or Topshop. Standing in between was Jobs. Often the only thing he brought to the table was his own perfectionism and vanity. Isaacson records a representative exchange between Jobs and James Vincent ...”

“... from his earlier work: Robert Southwell, Ruskin, the Church Fathers, Boethius, the Book of Daniel, ‘the solitary great ones – Isaiah, Amos,/Ezekiel’. To these can now be added ‘the De Causa Dei of Thomas Bradwardine’, the Polish poet Aleksander Wat, Milton (or, ‘Joannis/Miltoni’), Lucian, Erasmus, Sir Thomas More (‘Morus, humble and ...”

“... when exhausted, even offered money to passing schoolchildren to take it in turn to ring the door bell. One night well after midnight, some friends who lived opposite lured the smaller night shift of newspapermen away momentarily, while she and her family ran quickly across the mews into a friend’s house (they had left the door on the latch for just such an ...”

“... lineage. As far as the last is concerned – well, there’s the hidden Ireland uncovered by Daniel Corkery in 1928 (his study of 18th-century Munster appeared under that title), inhabited by people who took a very poor view indeed of the new English-speaking aristocracy that had ousted the old Irish-speaking one. ‘Valentine Brown’, as these purists ...”

“... should surely observe that request. The first word of the book is ‘I’, frequently an alarm bell in a biography, and there is a strong pong in the early pages of the Rainer Werner Fassbinder I Knew school. In fact, in respect of the biographer-subject relationship, there is one excellent joke which the author doesn’t intend and almost certainly ...”

“... the vouchers were rejected with the disdain she feared at all the shops she usually went to – Daniel Neal did not X-ray any old child’s feet. The only place that accepted them was a gloomy little cobbler’s shop which, as I remember it, was hidden away under a near derelict railway arch in the fashion wasteland of King’s Cross. The Dickensian and ...”