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“... Lazar at the Beverly Hills restaurant, the Bistro, in which the Dunnes were investors. In public, Frank Sinatra had verbally attacked Lenny Dunne. Yet Dominick was his real object – Lenny was being browbeaten for bringing in an outsider. A couple of weeks later, the Dunnes were at the Daisy – another hot place in town. Sinatra, his two daughters and Mia ...”

“... Frank Doubleday, the American publisher and friend of Rudyard and Carrie Kipling, once arrived at their house in Sussex to find Rudyard in a sweat in front of the hall fireplace shovelling a pile of his manuscripts into the flames. It was a horrifying sight, especially to a publisher. ‘For heaven’s sake, Rud, what are you doing?’ Doubleday asked ...”

“... social origins and a German name perhaps strengthened her resolve. (Lady Edith soon became close to her son-in-law, who designed her a wonderful house, Homewood, on the Knebworth estate.) From the start, Emily was an outsider in her own home; when she was Lutyens’s fiancée, she began to sew their entwined initials on the bed linen, but it was ...”

“... gain in this loss of verve, since the shimmering beauty of Barry’s imagery can sail perilously close to sheer fancifulness, even absurdity: ‘Her eyes had the green of the writing on a tram ticket,’ ‘Her legs are like the slender pillars of the courthouse in Baltinglass,’ and other such embarrassments. Barry can produce prose of great splendour, but ...”

“... not valid under Swedish law, so his entire estate has gone to his brother and father. The estate, close to worthless at the time of his death, is now a multi-million-dollar concern. This has led, unsurprisingly, to acrimony. Larsson had been in a 32-year relationship with fellow anti-Nazi campaigner Eva Gabrielsson, but as they never married, she was not ...”

“... in ‘an extravagant, eye-catching green robe, bought for him, in Tunis she thought, by his Aunt Frank on his first transatlantic trip’. Elective affinity was everything. As Williams said of Pound: ‘It took just one look and I knew it was it.’ Their relationship had a note of comedy in it: ‘He was impressed with his own poetry,’ Williams ...”

“... 31: He seems to me equal to the gods that man whoever he is who opposite you sits and listens close to your sweet speaking and lovely laughing – oh it puts the heart in my chest on wings for when I look at you, even a moment, no speaking is left in me no: tongue breaks and thin fire is racing under skin and in eyes no sight and drumming fills ears ...”

“... the smell found them, the smell and the uproar of flesh learning its mortality.’ There is frank talk of ‘preacherly drivel’ and a fine description of Queen Victoria as the ‘much-beloved though humourless dumpling of legend’. An American couple, surprised to find themselves hopelessly in love, are said to be ‘both so easily ridden in on by ...”

“... bourgeois or worse. It must have been rather as if Ivan Karamazov had suddenly materialised in the close at Barchester. No doubt Wittgenstein’s father, Karl, an Austrian steel magnate, bore some responsibility for the relentless soul-searching, the sense of sin and the pervasive unhappiness that beset his youngest son – and indeed nearly all his sons, for ...”

“... day, he remembers something he didn’t actually get to see: the ground is ‘where I once missed Frank Woolley just out when I arrived having made something like 70 in half an hour’. Others send birthday greetings, only to be trumped by the recipient: ‘The day doesn’t bother me. Just another. No better no worse. But the avalanche is appalling.’ Or ...”

“... in one volume … whose mysteries not even himself could read’. The coffin, a writing surface close to death, is the only object to survive the Pequod’s wreck. It serves as a lifeboat to convey Ishmael to safety – which, given that Ishmael is our narrator, makes it a device that delivers to us the entire content of the novel. It’s a literal ...”

“... it was just a secretarial mistake that she had been flown out to Los Angeles. I don’t think many close to the action doubted that Hawks intended to take her to bed. He ended up putting her under a personal service contract, changed her first name to Lauren, and ordered her to bring her voice and her gaze down. Hawks liked sophisticated women who could flirt ...”

“... its incorporation of stray materials, the personal touch on the elbow that the American poet Frank Bidart, a close friend and associate of Lowell’s, ‘both amanuensis and sounding-board’ for the many books of sonnets, has brought to it. (A no doubt garbled account once reached me of Lowell flying Bidart across the ...”

“... how to fend these off while yet remaining in a dialogue. And as with patients, so with Freud, Very close became too close. They challenged each other: Jung believed Freud was having an affair with his sister-in-law, and that the triangle was skewing Freud’s theories. Freud took a closer look at Jung’s dream of his ...”

“... cases came from knowing how to interpret the evidence. Angleton’s fascination with the power of close reading began when he was a student at Yale in the late 1930s in the era of I.A. Richards and the New Criticism, which held that the meaning of a poem came from the poem itself, and was completely independent of the history of the poet. Indeed, it was ...”