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“... when the dominant Di Lauro clan faced a schism in the depressed suburb of Secondigliano, two miles north of central Naples. ‘To follow the feud I’d managed to get hold of a radio capable of picking up police frequencies. So riding my Vespa I’d arrive at the scene pretty much at the same time as the squad cars.’ Saviano stays glued to that radio night ...”

“... story of his singularity was repeated so often that in 2014 his biographers Martin Lee-Browne and Paul Guinery could still claim that ‘Delius would spend his life composing music that bore no relationship to anything, good or bad, that had been written before.’Delius has been perceived this way in part because he wrote music that was not easily associated ...”

“... and snuff manufacturer (‘chairman of Sir Walter Scott’s Fine Border Snuff, 2012-, chairman of North Pennine Hunt 2008-’). Google suggests that Sir John is a rather small fish even in the small pond that is British snuff manufacture, though he has another claim to fame: between 2000 and 2003 he appeared with Clarissa Dickson Wright in a BBC series about ...”

“... called her ‘the smouldering, velvet-voiced, wanton-mouthed femme fatale of Algiers’.With its North African setting and ambivalent male lead, Algiers was one of the main inspirations for Casablanca. Warner Bros wanted a ‘foreign girl’ for the part of Ilsa, and their first choice was Lamarr. Louis B. Mayer, however, wouldn’t loan her out from ...”

“... for all departments of the school’. As well as obviously practical considerations, such as north light for painting studios, Mackintosh and Keppie improved on or introduced features including a gallery for the display of students’ work and congenial spaces for meeting ‘between the hours of study’. It was the consequent need for widely differing ...”

“... pondered this question the career of Jacques Doriot has always had a special fascination. Now Jean-Paul Brunet has ransacked just about everything – including police files – in order to put the full story together. He has an amazing story to tell. Doriot was the only child of a working-class family, his father a blacksmith forced into factory work and a ...”

“... was executed and the Kingdom of God failed to materialise, his followers reworked his message. Paul taught that Jesus had been resurrected bodily up to heaven and would return at any moment to gather his believers. It seems that Paul at first assumed he would live to see that day, then came to imagine an interim state ...”

“... a lot of time for a film Hollywood considered an ‘epic flop’. Its only defender was the star, Paul Newman, who bravely called it ‘the most significant film I’ve ever made and the best’. He and Stone came out of it as friends, but reviews and box office were dismal. Stone was the screenwriter of record and in his memoir of the 1960s, Prime Green, he ...”

“... the games’ participants. The workers’ sports movement, which had four million members across North America and Europe, was created by social democratic parties and trade unions and offered an inclusive model of sport, favouring participation over excellence and rejecting the rising tide of nationalism that accompanied Olympic sport. In 1925 it staged the ...”

“... on the evening of 7 November 1940, at a dance at the Crystal Ballroom in Fargo, North Dakota. It’s the closing number, rousing but rough, as though they had no formal arrangement; they never did record it commercially. (Ellington recorded it in 1928.) The tempo is uncommonly fast for this song, they abandon most of the melody, and ...”

“... criticism directed at him or his work by his friends. When the arch-Catholic poet and playwright Paul Claudel begged him not to publish an overtly gay passage in his 1914 novel Les Caves du Vatican, Gide corresponded with him at length (and agreed to the publication of their complete correspondence). He did not drop the offending passage – in fact he and ...”

“... threatens to stifle for ever the essential life of the characters. Think, for instance, of Paul Morel, who is left at the end of Sons and Lovers totally bereft, but walking towards – well, what? Like Alvina Houghton in The Lost Girl, like Aaron Sisson, Gilbert Noon has to get right out and become ‘unEnglished’, as Lawrence puts it. So he is ...”

“... and almost never – a further compliment – to the contemporary writers he most resembles, Paul Auster and Haruki Murakami, whose amiable postmodern noirs unfold in urban labyrinths and feature cerebral men searching for their own identities, and enigmatic women with an alarming tendency to vanish. He has produced novels with fantastic industry, and ...”

“... of the fantastic’ for the rest of New York. But his heart belongs to the Manhattan grid, the 12 north-south avenues and 155 east-west streets drawn on open land in 1807. The grid was a piece of real estate speculation (John Jacob Astor made his fortune not by trading furs, as American folklore has it, but by buying up blocks as the city pushed ...”

“... playne harts doe in the faces rest; Where can wee find two better Hemispheares, Without sharpe North, without declining West? What ever dyes, was not mixt equally. If our two Loves bee One, or Thou and I Love so alike that none doe slacken, none can dye. The poem describes the erotic glow at the beginning of an affair. ‘Countrey pleasures’ contains a ...”