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“... the heart and burned the ashes, banishing the revenant for ever. In A Natural History of Ghosts, Roger Clarke retells ‘the first true modern ghost story’, from Pliny’s letters, about a house in Athens haunted by ‘an old man, emaciated and filthy, with a long beard and unkempt hair’, who rattled his chains and drove the inhabitants to illness and ...”

“... many British films of the 1950s, for that matter – and no gay characters either (although Dennis Price and Robert Hamer, the star and director of Kind Hearts and Coronets, were both gay). The quintessential ‘Englishness’ so often lauded in these films wasn’t total: throughout his book, Stubbs is unusually attentive to the musical content of screen ...”

“... however, has always had his own champions: notably, his two previous biographers, John Connell and Roger Parkinson, and Correlli Barnett, who, in The Desert Generals (1960), went so far as to describe Montgomery’s Alamein as ‘an unnecessary battle’. Now Philip Warner has attempted a reassessment of Auchinleck’s career in the light of newly-available ...”

“... A footnote informs the reader that the novel is published by Messrs Hutchinson & Co at the price of 7s 6d. He visited station bookstalls to check that they were stocking his books, and bought drinks for bookshop managers; he was an early and assiduous member of the Paternoster Club, a backscratching organisation for authors, publishers, booksellers and ...”

“... this, and is particularly interesting on the resemblances between the aesthetic theory of Uvedale Price and modern ecological ideas, alike in their interest in diversity and niche. He describes Gainsborough’s methods of painting trees, but has surprisingly little to say about Constable. He reveals William Cobbett to be an old curmudgeon who ‘viewed trees ...”

“... the queen’s taste in Fabergé was restrained’, though it concedes that despite the ‘strict price range’ stipulated for royal gifts, the queen did find it in herself to accept some of the more expensive items, including a sculpture of flowers in a rock crystal vase with gold stems and diamond centres, presented to her by a Russian ...”

“... being a schoolboy and being a schoolmaster. Another, it was alleged, had been snapped up half-price on being sent down from Oxford after a distinguished foreign guest at his college, who had the night before stumbled into the unfortunate man’s bedroom mistaking it for his own, announced to the High Table that, as far as he could make out, the most ...”

“... to as the country’s population rose from less than three million to more than five million. The price of basic foodstuffs rose sevenfold while wages only trebled, and by the late 17th century, between a third and half of the population struggled to get by. ‘Proletarianisation’ saw huge numbers lose all resources except their labour. In their 1979 case ...”

“... that citizens have the right to reside in their own country and that nationality can’t carry a price tag – the deal Kiwan struck was staggering. The Emirati interior minister promised him $200 million in state funds in exchange for giving 4000 Bidoon families Comorian citizenship. Kiwan sent the Comoros’s MPs to Dubai to imagine what their ...”

“... of the Eighties was directors’ ‘share options’: that is, ‘options’ to buy shares at the price obtaining when the options are granted and instantly to sell them again. By this device directors of companies – whose shares go up in value – as has been the case throughout the period in the enormous majority of companies – proceeded to enrich ...”

“... Congo linking Joseph Conrad (who improved his English by reading the Lowestoft newspapers) with Roger Casement (whom Conrad much admired for his integrity), Sebald remarks on the ‘distinctive ugliness’ of Belgium and the stunted growth of its inhabitants. On one visit to Brussels he encountered more hunchbacks and lunatics than he would normally come ...”

“... Volume Five is called La Prisonnière in French and The Captive in English. It was declared by Roger Shattuck, a world expert on Proust, in his award-winning 1974 study, to be the one volume of the novel that a time-pressed reader may safely and entirely skip.8. The problems of Albertine are(from the narrator’s point of view)a) lyingb) lesbianism,and ...”

“... superiority of writing over motion pictures: films anaesthetise the imagination, he claimed: the price they ‘pay for trying to make a dream look as if it really happened’. Making a distinction of form, Chandler avoided the disturbing content of the dream – the murderer’s wish, which ties an innocent man to a demented killer. The pathos of the man for ...”

“... as I write (do cats eat bats or do bats eat cats?). ‘Whatever they may do,’ the bibliographer Roger Stoddard has noted, ‘authors do not write books.’ Leah Price and Pamela Thurschwell take up the distinction and declare that their volume will focus ‘on the representation, self-representation and ...”

“... at all closely; he reminds the reader of no one of this century. There is sometimes, it seems, a price to pay for this kind of originality. Although markedly eccentric, he is not just that. ‘When will this extraordinary writer receive his due?’ a critic has asked; nor is the question in the least surprising. Vansittart himself must be puzzled by the ...”