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“... These are women with names like Bubble Carew-Pole and Charlotte Bradley-Hanford and Juliet Mount Charles. Women who can say things like ‘My parents chose Wycombe Abbey because it was the nearest girls’ boarding school to Harley Street,’ or ‘My parents chose Heathfield because none of the girls had spots.’ Or, ‘My mother went to West Heath ...”

“... Octavio Paz, Louis Zukofsky and Charles Olson. As did any number of critics: Edmund Wilson, Harry Levin, Jacques Barzun, Lionel Trilling, Guy Davenport. Were all of them hornswoggled, taken in by the surface polish and acrobatics of Cummings’s style and, those who knew him, by his great personal charm, unable to register the paucity of ...”

“... These were followed by her most famous residence in the US – the 35-room mansion known as The Mount in Lenox, Massachusetts – and eventually by apartments in Paris, an 18th-century villa near Fontainebleau, and the Provençal house that she named Ste-Claire-le-Château, built on the site of a 17th-century convent in the old part of Hyères. Only The ...”

“... editorial continence? Instead of closing her paragraph here, Krauss spills on, and the sentences mount towards their pinnacle of schmaltz: The pain of forgetting: spine. The pain of remembering: spine. All the times I have suddenly realised that my parents are dead, even now, it still surprises me, to exist in the world while that which made me has ceased ...”

“... Updike’s work in the last decade, and the stack of diligent second-rate books is beginning to mount: Brazil (1994), which was full of soft writing; In the Beauty of the Lilies (1996), a complacent historical saga; Toward the End of Time (1997), a deeply misogynistic moan; Bech at Bay (1998), a fleshless game; More Matter (1999), a rag-bag of ...”

“... grinning Nancy replacing Teddy Roosevelt between Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln on Mount Rushmore); ‘If Nancy Was a Drawing by Leonardo da Vinci’ (her stolid features and purposeful stomp sketched on a sheet of Old Master drawings between noble profiles, sorrowing Madonnas, plaintive putti and snarling lions); ‘If Nancy Was the Bright’s ...”

“... but it goes well beyond him. In October 2018 the giant Nimitz-class aircraft carrier USS Harry S. Truman unexpectedly pulled out of the Eastern Mediterranean, where its planes had been bombarding IS’s positions in Syria. It sailed into the Atlantic and then suddenly and without warning headed north. Aircraft carriers don’t do this: their ...”

“... psychoanalysis’, according to the institute’s official history – under the then renowned Harry Stack Sullivan. Where orthodox Freudian practice focused on the internal dynamics of the individual psyche, Sullivan stressed the importance of patients’ social context: ‘what people do with each other’, as he put it. He and his colleagues (who ...”

“... was a Communist spy is treated as simple fact, as is his claim that FDR’s most trusted adviser. Harry Dexter White, the founder of the IMF and the World Bank, was also working for the Kremlin. The intellectual level of the book is perhaps best illustrated by Pincher’s laborious attempt to construct a mathematical equation to explain treason. The ...”

“... names, just as the middle classes in England at the end of the 20th century turned to Jack, Harry, Max and Ben. Whatever his real name, the fact that scholars in the Hellenistic period found it unbelievable that the great philosopher could be a ‘Plato’ – they preferred that his real name be Aristocles, ‘Famed for Excellence’, after his ...”

“... in the 1990s, when my father was working shifts as a sheet-metal worker, he loved to watch Harry Enfield, particularly the characters Wayne and Waynetta Slob, classic caricatures of welfare-dependent, indolent proto-‘chavs’. A Militant activist like Jones’s father, he wouldn’t have called them ‘undeserving’, he would have called them the ...”

“... Today, Ajaltoun is no longer in the countryside; the suburbs of Beirut stretch up the flanks of Mount Lebanon. I took a taxi up the mountain, following trucks that slowed nearly to a halt on the bends. The only information I had was that St John Philby lived in a small white stone house called Mahalla Jamil (‘beautiful place’). I had been told it was ...”

“... about it all, taking shooting classes, learning how to be fast on the draw, the lot. In Dirty Harry, Villiers said, Clint Eastwood says this is the most powerful handgun in the world so I reckon, OK, they got my brother but they’re sure as hell not getting me. But we thought your sister-in-law did it, we said. Maybe she did, he said. Quite possibly. But ...”

“... big fish he offered to Zeus Pankrates – discovered in 1952 and now buried under the statue of Harry Truman in Athens – that he commissioned a stone frieze to mark the occasion. Well, it could be a fish or it could be a large Cornish pasty – the sculptor was not a master of his art. In Rome on 15 October, they sacrificed one of the horses of a winning ...”

“... piano, Simone shut her eyes and began to play. At 4 a.m., when the set was over, she approached Harry Stewart, the owner and ‘host’, to ask how he liked her playing. Why hadn’t she sung? he asked. ‘I’m only a pianist,’ she said. ‘Tomorrow night,’ Stewart said, ‘you’re either a singer, or you’re out of a job.’ Nina Simone in ...”