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“... stock of available motives. When the detective is a policeman, like Fred Vargas’s Adamsberg or Ruth Rendell’s Wexford, the importance of maintaining the moral order is taken for granted, but even so tensions can be felt. A Wexford novel of the 1980s, for instance, would be likely to treat recreational drug use unambiguously as a legal matter, while ...”

“... hence-forth seemingly confined to his choice of socks. At Wellington he starts walking out with Ruth Bowman, ‘a 16-year-old schoolgirl and regular borrower from the library’. This period of Larkin’s life is quite touching and reads like a Fifties novel of provincial life, though not one written by him so much as by John Wain or Keith ...”

“... little rich boy if ever there was one – in a prominent grazing family. His mother, the imperial Ruth, could have been scripted by Noel Coward. Attaining widowhood, she left to spend her last quarter-century in the London which had always been the Mecca of her late-colonial class; until then, from World War One to 1937, she was a leader of Sydney ...”

“... out, leaving only the cavity’ – was still in existence when the novel was published in 1963. Ruth Glass’s coinage was contemporary: ‘gentrification’ described a peripheral phenomenon that was, at that time, far from a demographic shift. It was a fashion in its infancy, so diffuse and various that it had failed to register with less eagle-eyed ...”

“... he takes in making her happy. Yet ‘an odd thought crossed her mind: she would pick up the heavy glass ashtray and smash her husband over the head with it.’ Margaret is ashamed at the thought. Maybe it is a ‘perverted affectionate gesture’. But it will not leave her mind. ‘The cord that held the curtains back made her think: strangle him … Drown ...”

“... the uncanny faculty of melting through the leaves of the wallpaper, through the dark looking-glass, into a world which one can only call surrealist and irrational’. It was a process she could see happening in herself, to her own poems, and she welcomed it: The blood jet is poetry, There is no stopping it. Yet at the moment when she killed ...”

“... called Renzo Piano – design an exuberant building that delights some and outrages others: a glass box supported by a superstructure of steel and concrete, each façade a playful grid of prefabricated columns and diagonal braces, with a transparent escalator tube that snakes up the front, and other service tubes, picked out in primary colours, that run ...”

“... to show, he’s not an involving man. The novels she writes under the name Barbara Vine seem to be Ruth Rendell’s out-patient department, and certainly in Gallow-glass little Joe – as his enigmatic friend Sandor calls him – looks like a deserving candidate for community care. Illegitimate and unlovingly fostered, he ...”

“... return to second place is an artefact of the cratering of the Tory vote after a brief surge under Ruth Davidson; Douglas Ross blamed Partygate, but the disappearance of the party’s sole likeable and competent leader played a more salient role. The SNP’s hegemony remains untroubled. In Wales, Labour made impressive advances. Mark Drakeford, the party’s ...”

“... devotee of all things American, who eventually gained nearly 75 per cent of the poll. Moreover, as Ruth Cherrington points out in her valuable book China’s Students,* support for the idea of democracy has been based on the promotion of economic progress: ‘Believing in democracy for its own sake does not seem to be characteristic of Chinese political ...”

“... are people, from Aalto to Zuckermann, taking in Fidel Castro, Elizabeth David, Erskine Childers, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, Robert Byron, Lawrence Durrell, Le Corbusier, Malcolm MacDonald, Tambimuttu ... and Donald Maclean. It is completely typical of the whole book that Maclean (whom he knew at school at Gresham’s) is characterised solely by the ...”

“... on a train to St Pancras to deliver, to his sovereign, the unique bloom of a lily, enclosed in a glass bubble. The man is a harbinger of death, showing how the bloom in its misty bubble is dead as a stone, how the beat of my heart in time with his journey is steadily slower. Other poems recall the mother in a hospital bed, fed with oxygen through a tube in ...”

“... be a harbinger of death. Tessimond published only three collections in his lifetime, The walls of glass in 1934, Voices in a giant city in 1947 and Selection in 1958. The opening poem of The walls of glass is called ‘Any man speaks’; this man is not, however, entirely generic, for we learn he lives in London (‘To come ...”

“... for much of the USSR’s history. But we should bear in mind, to paraphrase the anthropologist Ruth Benedict, that the last thing a talking fish would be likely to mention is the water in which it swims. A particularly striking example of Bergman’s tendency to discount the Soviet context appears in his otherwise insightful analysis of Sakharov’s ...”

“... like flying in general. ‘I went to Mexico once and was sick for 18 years. Isn’t that right, Ruth?’ ‘That’s right, Bruno,’ old Ruth would chime in from the corner stool. I have always regarded it as one of the singular pieces of good fortune in my life that Bruno didn’t throw me out when I first wandered into ...”