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“... By the time you read me, anything might be happening. Brian Clough or Bob Stokoe or Elton John could be the new England manager, nursing bruised dreams for the World Cup in 1986. On the other hand, Sir Ron Greenwood might even now be contentedly inspecting the hotels in Bilbao, hoping to find a likely venue for the lads next summer. Thanks to a series ...”

“... no prerogative but what the law of the land allows him,’ he was echoing what his predecessor Sir John Fortescue had written in the 15th century: the king had no power to alter the law (that was for Parliament) or to administer it (that was for the judges). He was also reacting to what the law reporter John Hawarde had ...”

“... a trail, a trod, a path, a highway. Ever since my memory began I have followed such tracks with foot and eye: the stony, grassy drove roads along which herds and flocks travelled from Aberdeenshire to southern trysts and marts; the white blaze where scree pours down a mountainside from a gap in a solid crag; the slowly vanishing wake left by a liner among ...”

“... a ship called the Zembla). McGuire’s opening sentence is an ironic allusion to John’s gospel – ‘Then came Jesus forth, wearing the crown of thorns, and the purple robe. And Pilate saith unto them, Behold the man’ – but it also recalls the beginning of the novel that The North Water most resembles, Cormac McCarthy’s Blood ...”

“... gnomically (but it’s the truth), ‘Beckmann was time.’ He was successful early, painting John Martin-like catastrophes on a huge scale: visionary, awful, sandy things. The first monograph on him appeared before the First World War, when he was still in his twenties. In the war, he was an ambulance man on the Western Front, before suffering a complete ...”

“... art-historical spotlight after three centuries in the wings. But commentators are all on the back foot. We might argue that having trained in the north, Caravaggio learned artistic manners brasher than those with which his central Italian contemporaries felt comfortable, and that Counter-Reformation ideologues approved of this trenchant approach. It is ...”

“... humaine (1933). The first of these, which is set in Canton, was written before he ever set foot in China, but what he’d seen of Hong Kong and Saigon was enough to supply the novel with its ample urban colour. In La Condition humaine, the setting has moved north to Shanghai, and by the time he wrote it Malraux had been with Clara on an extensive Asian ...”

“... then died out, and with them the magic left the world. In the north of Westeros there’s a 700-foot-high wall, built to keep out ‘white walkers’, terrifying undead magical sort-of zombies who once lived in this same north and were a mortal danger to men. The wall is guarded by the Night’s Watch, a sworn order of men who take a lifelong oath to defend ...”

“... In ‘A Wave’, the title-poem of his new collection, John Ashbery says, among many other things: One idea is enough to organise a life and project it Into unusual but viable forms, but many ideas merely Lead one thither into a morass of their own good intentions. The reference to ‘one idea’ recalls the passage in ‘Esthétique du Mal’ where Wallace Stevens dismisses                                      the lunatic of one idea         In a world of ideas, who would have all the people Live, work, suffer and die in that idea In a world of ideas ...”

“... in circumstances that had a lasting effect. On 11 November 1975 the Governor-General, Sir John Kerr, dismissed Whitlam as Prime Minister, dissolved both houses of parliament, and installed the leader of the opposition, Malcolm Fraser, as head of a caretaker government pending immediate elections. It was the gravest crisis in Australian history. Hawke ...”

“... though I’d have thought the chances of him persuading his mamma to come are pretty slim. John Gielgud was once telling me about Mrs Simpson and how smart she was. ‘Mind you,’ he said, ‘she’d have made a disastrous queen. Didn’t go to the theatre at all.’ 19 January. Alan Bates opens tonight at the Barbican in the RSC production of Antony ...”

“... and William Dawes, a Boston tanner, were originally sent to warn two of the Revolutionary leaders, John Hancock and Samuel Adams, who were staying at a parsonage in Lexington, that a British force was on its way to arrest them. Both Revere and Dawes successfully completed this part of their mission, which was based on misinformation: the British had been sent ...”

“... want all that. And I want all that and I want all that.’ Or like the fast-food, fast-sex junkie John Self of Money, who always gets less than he bargains for, yet keeps going back for more: ‘I would cheerfully go into the alchemy business, if it existed and made lots of money.’ Amis goes to any length to remind us of our whole-hearted addiction to the ...”

“... the story. An intuition that Ryan could do this on the most forbidding terrain prompted his friend John Houseman in 1953 to offer him the lead in a New York stage production of Coriolanus. ‘He was a black Irishman,’ wrote Houseman in his memoir Front and Centre, ‘an athlete in his youth, a disturbing mixture of anger and tenderness who had reached ...”

“... even if Sylvie and Ruthie, escaping from Fingerbone, crossing the railway bridge perilously on foot, may (or may not) hear in a moment of extremity ‘some word so true we did not understand it, but merely felt it pour through our nerves like darkness or water’. The book itself, of course, is a redemptive act, a way of ‘keeping’ the lost things. The ...”