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“... some things that we do incomparably better than other nations if only we could stop this Gadarene rush down the slope of trans-Atlantic replication ... I actually saw her embracing her friend Margaret in a manner that I can only describe as fulsome. I was observing through a chink in the french window draperies. They appeared to be scantily clad. It was not a ...”

“... service profession, and Garbo and Valentino were versatile. Soon, Valentino relocated to that Gold Rush city immortalised by Jeanette MacDonald’s (and Judy Garland’s) San Francisco: there, according to Leider, Rudy ‘saw no alternative but to revert to his gigolo past, eking out a living by giving lessons and dancing for hire at Tait’s Café on ...”

“... The night​ before the midterms, I reread The Armies of the Night, Norman Mailer’s account of the 1967 March on the Pentagon. ‘Brood on that country who expresses our will,’ Mailer wrote:She is America, once a beauty of magnificence unparalleled, now a beauty with a leprous skin. She is heavy with child – no one knows if legitimate – and languishes in a dungeon whose walls are never seen ...”

“... grandfather was Swedish. Friedrich did well selling horsemeat in the Klondike during the gold rush, running saloons and, very probably, brothels. But he was an alcoholic and died young. His oldest son, Frederick, Donald’s father, went to work as a builder while he was still a teenager. He built his first house in Queens for a little less than ...”

“... to think that Remainers voted on the basis of Olympian rationality, while the Leave vote was a rush of blood to the head; they don’t take seriously the proposition that those who voted Leave might have known what they were doing. Barnett doesn’t hold this position. Although he is a Remainer, he accepts and indeed promotes much of the Leave case. The ...”

“... in 1797, but was not allowed to manage his fortune, household and vast estates, which included a Norman castle and close to 13,000 acres of land in Wexford. Instead, his formidable mother, Urania, ran his affairs, while Portsmouth himself, one of the wealthiest landowners in England, was provided with what amounted to pocket money. (He did better in this ...”

“... the Velvet Underground over Motown releases, the production skills of Brian Wilson over those of Norman Whitfield, and the social significance and songwriting talent of John Lennon rather than James Brown – persists. Clearly, too, most rock writing foregrounds lyrics, whereas most dance music works through texture, beats and effects. Back in 1976, punk set ...”

“... inspiration. The nose’s pleasures may be wordless, but they are fast. Hence the instant ‘rush’ relished by glue and cocaine-snorters and Bisto kids, and the less savoury gratifications of those whom Freud calls renifleurs – underwear-sniffers, among whom Corbin lists Goethe and Henri III. Erroneous world-view and bad science have played a main ...”

“... the Conquest to the Reformation, published in 1812, established terminology still in use today (Norman, Early English, Decorated and Perpendicular), may have owed something – if only its tighter focus on the visual evidence – to his limited education and ignorance of Latin. Rickman, who was also detached from nationalist and religious interest ...”

“... from great movies: the likes of Richard Blaine and Ilsa Lund, George Bailey, Travis Bickle and Norman Bates, who turn out, in the interstices of the entries, to have entangled lives and a dark plot all of their own. If only Howard Hawks wasn’t dead and had made a movie of Suspects we could all die happy and go to deconstruction heaven. Though the ...”

“... of agriculture, mainly in the Ukraine, in order to feed an urban population created by a headlong rush into industrial modernity. Both these programmes failed: Hitler’s armies were stalled in July 1941, then stopped before Moscow in December; Stalin’s collectivisation met with massive resistance from the peasantry and proved impossible to implement in the ...”

“... delay victory by at least ten years.Her upbringing and wealth had released her from the need to rush into marriage, which she idealised as a genuine relationship of ‘two workers, a man and a woman equal in intellectual gifts and loving hearts’, invoking the example set by one couple she knew – probably the Quaker writers William and Mary Howitt. From ...”

“... of poems by Robert Frost. The text is calm and informative, and quietly redundant – like Norman Mailer’s overwrought rhetoric polyfilling a collection of Marilyn Monroe pin-ups. Guiltily, we thirst for something wilder, more fearful. Though, in fairness, several photographs of forked lightning tongues scribbling electric graffiti above bland ...”

“... a pitiless arbiter of life and death. Holland strips out his prose so that mad minutes of combat rush at you: ‘Confusion, senses pummelled. The noise. The shaking ground. Men falling. Hard to keep going in this.’ Machine-guns open up like buzz-saws, flares crackle, rockets fizz, shells screech and suck air. Shrapnel – here Holland quotes Ernie Pyle ...”

“... Worldwide, CFC production should be phased out by 2010. With a journalist’s disenchantment, Norman Moss reports in Managing the Planet that bootleg CFC is still being made in Russia and China and smuggled into wealthier countries, but, since CFC is bulky and cannot be sniffed with any pleasure, the trade is gradually dying out. The hole in the ozone ...”