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“... him. His lifetime takes in a lot – World War One, the Easter Rising, the aviators Alcock and Brown. Prohibition, Fascism, Nazism, World War Two, the death camps, the history of modern literature, the history of cinema, a case of homosexual-style blasphemy (which precedes the Lady Chatterley case), homosexual marriage blessed by autocephalic ...”

“... street.’ He picks up a lump of chert that ‘resembled a white eyeball wrapped in layers of brown linen’ and the geologist tells him that chert is the young Palestinians’ favourite throwing stone: ‘During the first intifada the young ones who took on the Israeli military with chert became known as the “children of the ...”

“... gloss of gore. Another dialectical metaphor, deployed as the Volunteer is leaving the ‘broad brown murk’ of the Humber – ‘To north and south, a scanty shoreline welds the rusted steel of estuary and sky’ – welds the supposed opposites of nature and industry (and the rust is a reminder that industry is not immune to nature, that the destructive ...”

“... appear effete and irrelevant’. Over the years, a lot of these effete and irrelevant artists – John Updike, Norman Mailer, Jonathan Franzen – have launched tirades against him. The most concise comes from John Irving, commenting red-faced and furious on live TV: ‘Wolfe’s problem is, he can’t bleeping ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... sexual assault. The political centre of the court now shifted from Kennedy to the chief justice, John Roberts. Appointed by George W. Bush in 2005, Roberts was at one time a reliable Republican. He has been a bit less predictable of late, principally because, as chief justice, he is trying to ensure that the court retains a veneer of respectability. Roberts ...”

“... John Minton’s face is familiar – if not from the self-portrait now in the National Portrait Gallery, then from the likeness he commissioned from Lucian Freud and bequeathed to the Royal College of Art. It is very long, large-eyed, hollow-cheeked, with a receding chin and dark tousled hair. Photographs suggest that the self-portrait is a better physical likeness; the truth about his emotional state seems to lie with Lucian Freud ...”

“... bobbing on a sea of angry spume. One good example came nearly two years ago when he quoted Gordon Brown’s notorious line about ‘neo-classical endogenous growth theory’, which had been provided by Brown’s adviser, Ed Balls. ‘So it wasn’t Brown. It was Balls.’ The celebrated ...”

“... A relief, then, to turn from all this deranged big-talk to some sturdy English self-effacement. John Haffenden is steadily becoming the closest we have to a domestic version of the Mansos and Grobels. He has already published a book of earnest conversations with a dozen or so poets and this month he gives it a companion: Novelists in Interview.2 Plodding ...”

“... mean something like ‘went boldly on public record’. To his intimates he was candid enough. To John Blaikie, one of his earliest friends, he recounted in 1874 how, on the occasion of an accident that had put him in fear of death, ‘the Christian revealed religion had never seemed so little worthy of belief.’ When A.C. Benson asked him what he believed ...”

“... you sipped it. The drip-and-strainer method produced a fiendishly strong brew, an opaque deep red brown, which was then sweetened with two teaspoonsful of sugar. You weren’t supposed to taste the milk, it simply stopped the tea being transparent. My grandfather, whom I remember meeting only once, in a room somewhere in the East End that smelled of old age ...”

“... of democracy and with it the BBC and Patten. In 1997, Murdoch was more interested in wrecking John Major’s media legislation than anything else, and had procured from Tony Blair a promise that once in power he would dilute any such legislation. McKnight also argues – convincingly – that were Murdoch interested only in the opinion polls he would have ...”

“... part-Spanish friend is often ‘black’ if there is a hint of Africa in his or her make-up. John Bellew, the husband of Clare Kendry in Nella Larsen’s exquisite novel Passing (1929), responds violently when he finds out that Clare, who has cheeks of ‘ivory’ and hair the colour of ‘pale gold’, is ‘black’. All those years, ...”

“... with help from his father, his own farm on Staten Island. He visited his younger brother, John, at Yale, making friends with some of his high-minded circle, including Charles Loring Brace, who later founded the Children’s Aid Society. Brace and the Olmsted brothers travelled to Europe in 1850, walking through the English countryside and visiting ...”

“... at the end of the 14th century, set his son up as a lawyer. The lawyer bought land, and his son John inherited more, including Caister Castle, from his wife’s cousin, Sir John Fastolf. The Pastons always married well. They fought to maintain the Fastolf inheritance – in the courts against competing claimants but also ...”