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“... indeed to contain two such different representatives as John Henry Newman and James Fitzjames Stephen. They shared a distrust of reform and democracy, a love of England, and a penchant for getting into controversy in print. Otherwise, they strike one as chalk and cheese, or ‘dog and fish’, as Newman put it, à propos of their one encounter, in ...”

“... all, and they for him. Nicholas von Hoffman, a liberal news reporter who had been appalled by the young Roy Cohn who wreaked such havoc as Senator Joe McCarthy’s aide, has fallen into Cohn’s web, become entranced by him, and tries to get away with presenting him as a lovable rogue. Von Hoffman makes no attempt at sustained analysis: he is content to ...”

“... a serious problem for a medical man with a family to support – and in saving the life of a young captain. What happened to Burns in no man’s land was intolerably disgusting as well as traumatic, and even Rivers – normally so ‘adept at finding bearable aspects to unbearable experiences’ – is nonplussed. Although by the end there seems some ...”

“... has established an exhibition to illustrate Iraqi torture techniques. I walk around it with a young guide called Adel, who assures me that it has already been visited by many thousands of Kuwaitis. At one end of the room is a display of photographs of mutilated bodies. One image, even now difficult to forget, shows a sexless corpse hunched in a foetal ...”

“... stops when the 44-year-old composer settles in Moscow with his Spanish wife, Lina, and two young sons at the end of 1935. But it describes in detail the eight preceding years, during which Prokofiev lived and worked as a Westernised Russian making ‘business’ trips to his native land, increasingly drawn to the idea of resettling there. Like ...”

“... When Stephen Spender’s son Matthew was ten years old, he caught his hand in a car door. ‘The event,’ John Sutherland writes, ‘recalled other tragedies in the boy’s little life; the running over, for example, of his dog Bobby – a "rather lugubrious looking spaniel” and a present from his godmother, Edith Sitwell ...”

“... Xtopher,’ Stephen Spender wrote in April 1931, ‘is a cactus.’ Prickly, solitary, self-sufficient, hard to handle and difficult to love. How to get to grips with ‘Isherwood’ (as he has chosen to address him) was a problem for Peter Parker: something that perhaps explains the 12 years this usually brisk biographer has spent on his task ...”

“... that scaling peaks ‘contributed about as much to the advancement of science as would a club of young gentlemen who should undertake to bestride all the weathercocks of all the cathedral spires of the United Kingdom’. Such was the strength of mid-Victorian feeling against Alpinism that, in the words of one of its devotees, ‘a sort of palsy fell on the ...”

“... a limit to what she can achieve’ as a writer, is more debatable. Born in 1882, the young Virginia Stephen grew up in a society in which service, either giving or receiving it, was the defining relationship of domestic life, particularly for women. By 1850, Light tells us, 80 per cent of servants were female ...”

“... at Matthew Arnold’s, asks his friend to ‘bring it next time you come to the club’. Leslie Stephen, elected in 1877 on the strength of his History of English Thought in the 18th Century, enjoys the irony that this defence of free thought has given him ‘admission to a respectable haunt of bishops and judges’. By 1850, the Disruption in the Kirk has ...”

“... certainly decisive in securing convictions. The other defendants were charged with kidnapping a young woman, who was so frightened of giving evidence that she ran away. The Supreme Court’s cogently reasoned judgment came at a time when political pressure was building to reduce the European court’s interventions in the UK’s legal system. How then was ...”

“... I was half-right. There was no sign of Burundi’s chief executive. In his place was a personable young couple – he in pinstripes, she in a tailored suit – who told me how happy they would be to arrange a meeting with their boss, the President, for me. I had only to say the word, so I did. I also said: ‘By the way, how did you know my ...”

“... time to give the encounter at Holy Cross a thought. However, later that week I came across a pale young man with a moustache, and wondered where I knew him from. In a surreal moment of social embarrassment, I was at an IRA funeral with him and for a moment, I just couldn’t place him. What made it doubly awkward was that I couldn’t really avoid him. He was ...”

“... highly successful movie, starring Jane Fonda and Vanessa Redgrave. Julia is portrayed as a wealthy young American woman, who has been to Oxford, and during the 1930s is living in Vienna, where she is studying medicine. She is also being psychoanalysed and looking after her child. At the time of the bombardment of the Karl Marx Hof, a block of ...”

“... Stephen Sondheim is America’s master of musical theatre, as long as we are prepared for the work to be brilliant but not relaxed. His is a voice of solitude struggling to believe in company, and that of a lifelong game-player, so be careful about taking this book at face value as an autobiography, or as giving the whole story ...”