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“... couch. To me, this made her an aristocrat.’ Obviously it couldn’t last. The couple’s friend Frank Bidart told Schoenberger that he was ‘afraid of how destructive [Blackwood] could be when she drank … She once threatened to put her children in the car and smash into a wall.’‘It’s hard not to read The Stepdaughter as a veiled account of ...”

“... Henry Mackenzie and Walter Scott had been before him. There Karl became favourite pupil and close friend of Hector MacIver, that incomparable teacher of literature, who recognised his gifts and took him with his other clever boys down the Calton Hill to Rose Street. In those days, a sort of café society still flourished in Edinburgh. You knew which set ...”

“... younger brothers – Henry, said to have been her favourite, who lived in London, and the sailor Frank, who reported to her from various war fronts … The sisters made good aunts and friends to the next generation.’ Austen cared for some of her nieces and nephews after their mothers died, and seems to have been remembered fondly by all of them. When one ...”

“... Marilyn Monroe fucked both Kennedy brothers before taking her own life, if she did indeed take it. Frank Sinatra raised money for the Reagans and acted as at least a confidante to the First Lady. Norman Podhoretz’s son-in-law Elliott Abrams, while working as Reagan’s Assistant Secretary of State, dunned the Sultan of Brunei for a $10 million backhander to ...”

“... twenty years after Thomas Mann’s death, when Katia was in her nineties. It is extraordinarily frank and perceptive in its own naive way; with Mann’s diaries, it offers all we need to know about him. Three new books on Mann, however, each as long as Buddenbrooks, have appeared in English. Ronald Hayman and Donald Prater are Rosencrantz and Guildenstern ...”

“... scenery appealed particularly to Anglo-Saxon professional men of liberal leanings (perhaps the close company of tough and handsome native guides had something to do with it).’ For whatever reason, the ever-expanding Victorian empire brought many mountains of respectable height within British purview, and also bred people, British in outlook and ...”

“... The motor industry makes £200 billion a year, accounting for 8 per cent of GDP. It employs close to one million people, which explains why successive governments have spent so much public money propping it up. Besides, its central belt is in the Midlands, where a large number of Labour MPs have marginal seats. Even before the recent expenses ...”

“... own way. Both were frustrated in love, through indifference, betrayal or bereavement, but enjoyed close and enduring friendships with men. Both were Imperialists who served Britain with distinction in wartime, placing the special knowledge acquired in their travels at the disposal of military intelligence. In the carefully ordered realm of public ...”

“... door with his brusque ‘Ullo, ullo, ullo’ to wreck any chance of intimacy. The scripts were by Frank Muir and Denis Norden, very funny in their day and funny enough now. Ken Livingstone’s mother was an Eth: Ethel Ada Kennard, a dancer in a three-women act that toured the music halls. His father was a Bob: Robert Moffat Livingstone, at different times a ...”

“... made Life and Fate into the book it is. Grossman was never a Party member and several people close to him had spent time in prison for political offences – his cousin, his second wife – but he, to use the language of a different set of circumstances, made the choice to ‘work within the system’. He did not, however, manage to delude himself in the ...”

“... his part but from browsing through a newly-published book, The Production of Antibodies (1949), by Frank Macfarlane Burnet and Frank Fenner. Macfarland Burnet and Fenner described some remarkable work by Ray Owen, an agricultural geneticist at the University of Wisconsin, who had found that all cattle twins, whether ...”

“... who had clearly been murdered and whose bones bore the ‘taphonomic signature’ of cannibalism. Close to these remains, Billman’s team also discovered a human coprolite which, once subjected to an immunological assay, provided unambiguous scientific evidence that ingestion of human body parts had taken place. The Turners’ own account of the motive ...”

“... the rain, gleaming black BMWs swept past carrying Treuhand officials on their way to privatise or close more state factories. As in the old South, a whole ideology justifying the power structure had been switched off, and its guardians – in this case, the SED, the National People’s Army and the immense web of the Stasi and its informers – found ...”

“... change in the relationship between George and Yeats. Around 1928 and 1929 she ceased to have a close sexual relationship with him and became his nurse, the devoted mother of his children and a great worrier on his behalf. Both Yeats and their children seemed to suffer from great numbers of illnesses, which Saddlemyer lists in detail. From the time George ...”

“... perhaps even the future of the British race, was under threat from homosexuality. Something close to a great replacement theory was embraced in 1958 by the Labour MP Frederick Bellenger, who said that if the ‘malignant canker … were allowed to grow, it would eventually kill off what is known as normal life’. During the second reading of the Sexual ...”