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“... was accompanied by a widespread fascination with ‘Gypsies’ in popular culture. Klaus-Michael Bogdal, a professor of German literature at the University of Bielefeld at the time of the riots, was struck by the contradiction. In the early 1990s, Germans were taking up flamenco lessons. The French-Gitano band Gipsy Kings was hitting the top of the ...”

“... years ago, it seemed almost disappointingly ‘realistic’ after the wonderland of The Wild Goose Chase, where Warner had used Kafka’s technique for brilliant political satire, rather than for spiritual questioning: it was a world of mad, laughing policemen and football matches between Left and Right fixed for the latter’s benefit. But in The Aerodrome ...”

“... through. In one of my ration I found the baptism, on 14 December 1640, of Eaffry Johnson at St Michael’s in Harbledown, a village half a mile outside Canterbury towards which I sometimes feel the fates nudging me, since I had already visited it in the course of Michael Levey’s research for his biography of Walter ...”

“... are represented only by a brief piece against utilitarian supply-siders, and his review of Michael Walzer’s book Spheres of Justice, in which Dworkin rather loftily denounces a theory which in fact has more to offer on these problems of equality than he allows – in particular, by allowing more room for the historical peculiarities of a given ...”

“... this was how he preferred to spend his time, and he bitterly resented being dragged away from the chase to attend to more serious business. His favourite sport was pursuing deer on horseback, ‘with running hounds, which is the most honorable and most noblest sort thereof’, as he described it in Basilikon Doron. It was also particularly dangerous, but ...”

“... Monsters and delusions of a more agreeable kind lurk in the stylish, elaborately skilful pages of Michael Dibdin’s A Rich Full Death. Ostensibly this is a detective story, a species of Holmesian charade penned by a paranoiac Dr Watson: yet even at this level it teases the reader with mysteries that go beyond the conventionally mysterious. The story is set ...”

“... Country. He said that he’d bought the farm mainly because he wanted to build it up for his son, Michael, who worked alongside him. But a month ago he’d driven into Ixopo to get some provisions when the farm radio in his bakkie sounded an alarm ‘for Mr Arthur or Michael Mitchell’. Either Mitchell Sr or Mitchell Jr ...”

“... of some extraordinary exacerbations of the idea of running rather than walking. In Lahore the boys chase kites from house to house, leaping along the rooftops. The blind Mehta joins in, employing what he later learns is called ‘facial vision’ – ‘an ability that the blind develop to sense objects and terrain by the feel of the air and by differences in ...”

“... for lunch together, and when Brecht comes back Eisler – really lovely, the stringent cut-to-the-chase of these Marxist types! – asks him how much Zweig shelled out for lunch. ‘Two and six,’ Brecht replies, a Lyons Corner House or something (and at the time the multi-millionaire Zweig was residing in Portland Place), and then it’s straight back to ...”

“... a gate towards the Golf Club. The young cop in pursuit was going well, and the last I saw of the chase was the cop throwing his helmet into the shrubbery the other side of the fence. I hope that, thus disencumbered, he caught his man. There was a don at Corpus Christi, Oxford named Grundy, of whom good stories were told, in imitation of his voice and ...”

“... you know the English have two hundred different words for rain?’ People go to Oklahoma to chase tornadoes. Siberians moan about the cold but exult in it, too. The heat and humidity of the tropics are also its attraction, but though the electric greenness of our land is due to the rain we find no joy in it except when it isn’t raining. It rains about ...”

“... on which he’d been elected, and to find a way of blaming it on others. It was decided to send Michael Armacost, an old China hand in both Democratic and Republican Administrations, to conduct the final obsequies. Armacost, indeed, refused to take on the mission ‘unless there was a consensus that the human rights linkage was going to be jettisoned. He ...”

“... during the Saturday morning show as a policewoman announced the retirement of two police dogs, PD Chase and PD Viper, and encouraged the audience to put their hands together as the two animals streaked across the arena for ‘one final bite’, PD Viper leaping at the volunteer with such shocking violence that the man sitting behind me shrieked: ‘Jesus ...”

“... drew a different response: he was sure he could make something better. For Kubrick (according to Michael Herr, his friend and collaborator on the screenplay of Full Metal Jacket), ‘there was definitely such a thing as a bad movie, but there was no movie not worth seeing.’ He told Herr in an exuberant moment that The Godfather must be the greatest movie ...”

“... after a few more murders, some spectacular fireworks at a chemical factory and an elaborate car chase, goes mad and is locked away in his own hospital, where Mabuse had been a patient. The doctor’s name is Baum and has never been anything else, but when he finds someone in the room he is to occupy as a patient he introduces himself with great formality ...”