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“... of his friends, happy to be in the company of the head of the English Catholics, a man not given to any obvious show of relaxation but, rather, seeming constantly anxious about being behind with business. Nearby is the English College, or the Venerable English College, as its fanbase likes to call it. Father Clive was waiting on the steps for ...”

“... this book I cannot explain,’ he wisely concedes.) But he has come up with a nice idea. Just as Paul Fussell set himself, in The Great War and Modern Memory, to map the mythicisation of the First World War in the popular conscience – the images and icons we remember it by, and how these are themselves symptomatic of the selective desires, prejudices and ...”

“... patrons. Scipione Borghese, Bernini’s first great supporter and client, persuaded his uncle Pope Paul V to make his lover Stefano Pignatelli a cardinal; and Antonio Barberini, Pope Urban VIII’s notorious nephew, was made a cardinal at the age of twenty, to howls of protest, and proceeded to populate the family palace – now famous for its collection of ...”

“... in old age to use the glasses which had been denied him earlier as ‘unsuitable for a young man’; and in Johnson’s account, the wilful refusal of optical amelioration was the prime cause of Swift’s self-isolation. ‘Having thus excluded conversation, and desisted from study, he had neither business nor amusement; for having by some ridiculous ...”

“... to the project ‘if they existed’. There was no genetic link between the narrator and the man he called grandfather, since the French grandmother of ‘Michael Chabon’ had already had her only child, a daughter, by the time she met her husband in America after the war. The couple seem to express between them the whole horror of Europe in the 20th ...”

“... on TV – they never reveal much of themselves.What is known about Woodward? He’s a former navy man, who wrote several hundred articles on Watergate for the Washington Post with his colleague Carl Bernstein. The two then wrote famous books about the fall of Nixon, All the President’s Men and The Final Days, the first made into a well-known ...”

“... uncompromising – seems the natural example of what ‘the young’ will not respond to. ‘A man looking at a mountain: why does it have to be so complicated, they want to complain?’ In Disgrace, the choice is also ironical, for Wordworth’s greatest poem is about being young. Its recollected passion and youthful wonder are audible only to the angrily ...”

“... Easily available domestic and farm animals remain the most popular partners, however. The dog is man’s (more often woman’s) best friend in this sense too, ‘because it requites love. Sexual love does not have to be reciprocal, but it is nice when it is.’ Dekkers even tells you how to get a dog to mate with you: ‘With some adjustments it is not ...”

“... right in front of me at the next table, facing half away but unmistakeable, in full colour, sits Paul Funge. It is some years since I have seen him, and this is not the right time, and he knows that too, but we are old friends and we are both alone at lunchtime and he knows and I know that I must join him at his table. The painting I bought from him more ...”

“... a sock on a rooster’); and the more persistent, reliable, searching composite view of the man. Stevens was the ‘grindingest guy they had there in executive row’ at the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company; in his letters he was precise but ‘only colourful when he was writing to some old friend’; he kept no photos of wife or daughter in his ...”

“... he advised on the decoration of her new house.) Ada Leverson was not worried by Wilde’s train de vie. To another friend, who said he was on a strict regimen ‘in the hope of keeping my youth’, she replied: ‘I didn’t know you were keeping a youth’ – this, like other unpredictable things, in a low voice, almost thrown away. To use her circle’s ...”

“... of street children living around the Hidalgo Metro stop. Others are urban types: the tyre repair man, the sewer cleaner, the organ grinder – according to Villoro, ‘the out-of-tune sound that emanates from the device reminds us of the state of the nation’ – as well as the army of street vendors. (They play a prominent role in Mexico City’s ...”

“... of the middle-class vote as being the products of eight years of Thatcherism. In fact, this class de-alignment had been visible as a trend (and extensively written about by academics) for several years before the advent of Thatcher. The real question is not whether she has pulled workers over to the Tories but whether Thatcherism is not in part the product of ...”

“... Vehicle One, or the ‘electric turkey’ as critics have unkindly called it) may join the De Lorean, cold fusion and Clive Sinclair’s C5 self-propelled sitz-bath in the technology junkyard. ‘Electrics’ – battery-powered automobiles – have a venerable pedigree. The first successful model was exhibited at the World’s Fair in 1892. William ...”

“... the design of this great building implied a date half a century or so later. William Marshal was a man for firsts. Another archaeological delight is to contemplate his grave-monument in London’s Temple Church, scarred in 1941 (with dark appropriateness) by a war whose technology was even more impersonally brutal than his own military prowess. There you may ...”