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“... that Dickens was then busy launching; one thanked a Sheffield firm (innocently mentioned in David Copperfield) for the gift of a set of knives; another attempted to patch up his lapsed friendship with George Cruikshank, who had probably been offended by Dickens’s attacks on his temperance pamphlets; another was a long, newsy report to a Swiss friend ...”

“... Vernon Howell​ – better known as David Koresh – arrived at Mount Carmel, the Texas base of a Seventh Day Adventist splinter sect called the Branch Davidians, in the summer of 1981. He was 21 years old and looking for a new church. A ‘wandering bonehead’, as he would later describe himself, he had been kicked out of a mainstream Seventh Day Adventist congregation in Tyler, Texas for having sex with the 15-year-old daughter of a church elder (or at least trying to), and for refusing to stop haranguing church leaders about the correct interpretation of scripture ...”

“... of eggs, the outermost plastered with guano like heaped drippings of candlewax from the next storey up. From round the corner I heard another razorbill trying to scare off the enemy with a deep gurgle like a coffee percolator. I slanted off to the right, ashamed of intruding on this high-rise maternity ward, and the birds sat tight. Across the 800-foot ...”

“... that had lived on the Qatar peninsula for at least three centuries. The tallest building was a two-storey fort constructed by the Ottomans in the 19th century. Although ruled, as now, by the al-Thani dynasty, it was a British imperial protectorate. Its only significant source of wealth had been the pearl fishing industry, but that was destroyed by the Second ...”

“... Gallant has been offered a regular platform under the benign aegis of William Maxwell and, later, David Menaker. Although they span almost half a century – the earliest was published in 1953, the latest in 1995, Gallant’s 73rd year – they are nonetheless eerily consistent in voice and preoccupation. Gallant writes about exiled people: characters in ...”

“... made a ‘five-figure contribution’; the rest was covered by the then owners of the hotel, David and Frederick Barclay, identical twins who appeared on the Sunday Times Rich List later that month with a combined fortune of £2.3 billion.This wasn’t the first time the Barclays had helped to house Thatcher. After leaving Number Ten she had moved into ...”

“... Dr Leavis’s admiration for T.F. Powys, Dylan Thomas spoke of the little village of ‘Upper Storey’: ‘a small, lunatic area of Wessex, full of saintly or reprehensible vicars, wanton maidens, biblical sextons and old men called Parsnip or Dottle ... Everyone in this sophisticatedly contrived bucolic morality, has his or her obsession: Minnie Wurzel ...”

“... She can’t prove that Nelly and Dickens had a child, she admits, but she thinks they did: Gladys Storey, a friend of Dickens’s daughter Katey, once said that there may have been a child, a boy, who died shortly after birth. No evidence, no matter how apparently unyielding, seems to have gone unmarshalled. Dickens made several trips to France in the early ...”

“... in autobiography; it positively ‘encapsulates rather than . . . qualifies its meaning’, as David Vincent has put it. However, it’s still possible to plot the degrees to which it was allowed to flourish in the FWP biographies. This is how Mary Hicks introduces her interview with Betty Cofer, a former slave of a plantation-owning family, in North ...”

“... and a peacock called Mirabell, all of it recorded with the help of Merrill’s longtime partner, David Jackson, during twenty years of séances using a Ouija board at their home in Stonington, Connecticut. This volume tips in at 560 pages. Merrill also wrote novels, plays and two memoirs. Born to enormous wealth, he had little to distract him from his ...”

“... French’s Bleeding Heart, Malcolm Bradbury’s Stepping Westward and Rates of Exchange, and David Lodge’s Changing Places and Small World. Now, all around the large cabin, other refugees from Roger Moore in For Your Eyes Only and from Gene Wilder in The Woman in Red have their noses stuck into novels. Could it be that a certain kind of novel is being ...”

“... of conversation, I tried delicately to ask why and how Dau’s backers were providing a five-storey office building in one of the world’s most expensive districts for the sole purpose of curating an artistic project that had yet to be put before an audience, four years after filming wrapped in Kharkiv.* My curiosity chilled the atmosphere. Julius, once ...”

“... original sin, secularised as the problem of anti-social behaviour, has been remarkably resilient. David Trotter believes that what we have learned to call Modernism is more akin to the cumulative trauma of secularisation, and that if we can’t get a wholly convincing sense of the beginnings of Modernism, we can get the next best thing: a sense of what the ...”

“... were not strictly personal property. In his essay on Warsaw apartments in the 1950s and 1960s, David Crowley quotes Czeslaw Milosz’s remark that ‘to protect his position and his apartment (which he has by the grace of the state), the intellectual is prepared to make any sacrifice or compromise; for the value of privacy in a society that affords little ...”

“... fortified compounds, surrounded by thick, high mud walls. We are taken to a carpet-lined second-storey sitting-room, or betek. The room, in which we will eat and sleep, is safely away from the family quarters. Our hosts are all big, burly men with beards, many of whom fought with the mujahidin warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar during the 1980s and 1990s. One of ...”