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“... rugs in a small chamber. ‘As soon as they recognised the presence of a Sahib among them, they rose en masse, and, with the greatest gravity, proceeded to “shoo” me out of their presence as one might “shoo” a strayed fowl. It seems that I had trespassed too close to the ladies, and as none of the five elders understood English, they had adopted ...”

“... in which Stevens found his niche at the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company in 1916; he rose to Vice President of the firm in 1934 and was still working there at the time of his death) but claims to hear ‘puns’ in such phrases as ‘barque of phosphor’ or ‘droning of the surf’ in the early ‘Fabliau of Florida’, or the ...”

“... to return favours … which could make her seem cold and ungrateful’. Carruth’s wife, Rose Marie, remembered the meadow where Conrad killed himself as the site of an infamous picnic, where an increasingly abrasive Rich announced that ‘she planned to give away her pots and pans’ and ‘do a lot less cooking’.After Conrad’s death, Rich ...”

“... shrine is easily flooded, recalling the story that after the holy man’s death an island of sand rose from the sea and the bearers of the saint’s bier were compelled to inter him there, where the elements miraculously met and merged. A place of shifting elements and boundaries, Luar Batang also marks another meeting. It contains two holy tombs, those of ...”

“... The Jeddah had for some days been taking in water. Now it sprang a heavy leak. The water rose rapidly. The captain and the European officers abandoned the settling and heavily listing ship, taking Seyyid Omar with them, and were picked up by another vessel and taken to Aden, where they told a story of violent passengers and a foundering ship. The ...”

“... ownership led to a wartime golden age of radio propaganda. The Nazis were quickest off the mark, but other governments soon followed their example; in 1941, Britain’s ‘black radio’ network, under Sefton Delmer, began to broadcast anti-Nazi, anti-war messages in German. That these operations often enjoyed only limited success did nothing to ...”

“... when he did appear in Julius Caesar, Forrest played the less intellectual and more show-stopping Mark Antony, but he much preferred those Shakespearean roles which allowed him physically to dominate the stage for a large proportion of the play and then to finish on a spectacular death: roles like Richard III, Hamlet, Othello, King Lear and, above ...”

“... moving in front of me. Then I did, and the shock was like stepping on an adder. A clump of heather rose up and stood full height, revealing the figure of a grinning, camouflaged soldier. A platoon of Gurkhas emerged from veils of blaeberry and moss, rifles downwards, to share in the joke. For me, it was an education in the proximate power of the ...”

“... returned and clicked on the second column. Presently a thing like a solid grey-white cauliflower rose until it was a mountain covering all south Manhattan. This is how we bury you. It was the most open atrocity of all time, a simple demonstration written on the sky which everyone in the world was invited to watch. This is how much we hate you. Six thousand ...”

“... or Bill Clinton.’The beards were unimpressed. One of the few beardless men in the audience rose to his feet and addressed the Congressman: ‘Please answer honestly to our worries,’ he said. ‘In Afghanistan we helped you defeat the Red Army. You needed us then and we were very much loyal to you. Now you have abandoned us for India. Mr Clinton ...”

“... the restrictions of what it contained and, resisting all impatient access, leaving the intractable mark of genius on it, in more, and more unforgettable, images than any other novel ever written. Proust aimed at the sublime. His addiction to hyperbole could become a lame – on occasion even an absurd – striving for it: few passages in Western literature ...”

“... anything in the 1990s, yet between 2005 and 2008 prices soared: wheat and maize grown in the US rose by about 130 per cent; so did American soya, which goes mostly to animal feed. Dairy prices shot up (butter by 74 per cent, powdered milk by 69 per cent); the price of chicken went up by two-thirds. A month before the banking meltdown in 2008, ‘food ...”

“... whose parents were born in Bangladesh. ‘No matter how many times you give them information, or mark their card, they still contaminate the bloody recycling bins. They hide all sorts of stuff at the bottom of the organic bins – like machine parts. There’s no telling them.’ He showed me one of the bins outside a large house; it had grass on the top and ...”

“... mend cars, keep dogs, but still have wondrously youthful chests and are always up for it. Dogs may mark the point at which Sallis and his deconstructed/reinvented crime novel break away from the form as we once knew and loved it. Wasn’t Humphrey Bogart as Roy ‘Mad Dog’ Earle, in Raoul Walsh’s film of W.R. Burnett’s High Sierra, undone by a barking ...”

“... historian of the PCI, describes an Apulian peasant who kept a map in his stables where he would mark with a pin the progress of the Russian advance during 1943 and 1944 and then calculate how many hours it would take them to cross the Adriatic and get to his village. In Sicily, militants like Calogero waited for ‘Uncle Joe’ (in Sicilian dialect, lu zi ...”