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“... a tortoise. It was nearly a metre long, with short, spikily scaled legs tucked beneath its shell. A black liquid stained the dry red earth around it. Beside it was the carcass of a donkey, white bone showing beneath what little flesh remained. A few metres away a warthog lay rotting, and beyond that a camel. For miles outside the village – and ...”

“... out: ‘Look at me! … Don’t you think I’m beautiful?’ In fact, she thought he looked like Donald Duck, and insisted he put his clothes on and take her to meet André Breton. ‘There has only been one really good edition of anything that Shakespeare wrote,’ he told the writer Ruthven Todd, ‘and that is an edition of Venus and Adonis that I did ...”

“... as the most famous of all doomed Romantics: ‘Yet we are as the double almond concealed in one shell,’ he broods in ‘Colloquy with John Keats’, going on to predict his own equally untimely demise in harsh demotic terms – ‘Look! My number is up!’ After his cremation at Rookwood Cemetery Ethel opened his trunk and set about disposing of his ...”

“... reputation’. This assessment stood in stark contrast to the confident war planning for Iraq that Donald Rumsfeld ordered in November 2001. Fresh from the swift removal of the Taliban with special forces and airstrikes, American military planners felt that its imperial tasks could now be managed by means of an air war and a modest number of specialist shock ...”

“... would learn from the Oxford History that the slaughter of the aborigines was often intentional. Donald Denoon and Marivic Wyndham, who write here about Australia and the Pacific in the 19th century, suggest matter-of-factly that ‘indigenous peoples were decimated and outnumbered by new, expanding societies of free British migrants,’ but they seem to ...”

“... but, Florida being Florida, all that energetic for-profit concerns had to do was set up non-profit shell companies as nominal administrators. By 2002, according to the St Petersburg Times, three-quarters of all newly established charter schools were managed by for-profit companies. One such edubusiness, the Richard Milburn Academy, has been forced to close ...”

“... say Truth lies there. In another minute I should have found it, and you would have found an empty shell. It is an easy way of getting rid of the body.’Maybe it happened just like that: it reflects suspiciously well on the plain manliness of Trelawny of course, but it would be a weird story to make up. Either way, it beautifully gets something about the ...”

“... only three. He survived the beatings and misery of an English boarding school and got a job with Shell. When war broke out he volunteered as a fighter pilot. He had a bad crash-landing in Libya while flying to join his squadron. That fractured his skull and left him with permanent back trouble, as well as giving rise to various tall stories. These include a ...”

“... poems; only Yeats and Hardy had significantly more. True, Larkin’s anthology was denounced by Donald Davie and others as a counterblast against Modernism. But it can’t be denied that Sassoon’s war poems share with Kipling’s the quality of being conspicuously memorable: the Oxford Dictionary of Modern Quotations includes a dozen of them, mostly in ...”

“... on the shelves. A framed pen drawing showed a red face with bouffant hair (it could be Marshall or Donald Trump) blowing away the word ‘snowflake’. Despite styling itself ‘a new home for free thinkers’, the UnHerd Club has a reputation as a favourite spot for young fogies whose politics range from centre-right to Reform-curious.When GB News launched in ...”

“... the shells aside, and the Genii starting up and saying he must kill the merchant, because a date shell had put out the eye of the Genii’s son’. It’s a good story but you couldn’t say it was a very gracious one, since it turns so unkindly on the joke of Mrs Barbauld’s befuddlement before ‘a work of such pure imagination’ (in Coleridge’s own ...”

“... called ‘ecological genocide’. The executions of community leaders, he said, were ‘all for Shell’. In my country, Canada, the decision to dig up the Alberta tar sands – a particularly heavy form of oil – has required the shredding of treaties with First Nations, treaties signed with the British Crown that guaranteed Indigenous peoples the right ...”

“... past. His bag is bulging with ancient guidebooks – among his favourites are Betjeman’s Shell county guides – and his technique is comparable to that used in Adam Thorpe’s short story ‘In the Author’s Footsteps’, in his new collection, Is This the Way You Said?* Here an obstinately backward-looking rambler uses old maps and guidebooks ...”

“... agrees with you, that your own sensitivities found their domain in the end, and that deep in the shell of your inexpensive car you came to know your subjectivity. Of course, one may find these things in the marriage bed or in a gentleman’s club, but those places have rules and your car is your own bed, your own ...”

“... was something she had not spoken of for thirty years. ‘A baby?’ ‘He was going to be called Donald,’ Mrs Ransome said, ‘but he never got that far.’ Unaware that a revelation had been made the young man stroked his nipple reflectively as he walked her out into the hall. ‘Thank you for clearing up the mystery,’ she said and (the boldest thing ...”