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“... on him by the other characters, who are at once total strangers to him but also appear to be close family members. At last, about two-thirds of the way through the novel, he manages to find somewhere to practise, a ‘little wooden hut’ at the top of a hill with ‘an upright piano of somewhat grubby appearance’. But even here the irresistible ...”

“... It ran for four issues and included the founders’ work alongside that of Barbara Guest, Frank O’Hara, Edwin Denby and others. Locus Solus was like the intersection of New York, Paris and a Surrealist Arcady.Mathews credited Roussel with showing him that prose could be generated under similar constraints to those that apply to poetry, a discovery ...”

“... which they liked and which they wanted taken out. She presented them to a wider crowd at Frank Zappa’s birthday party at the Mudd Club in 1979, the year after she moved to a windowless loft in the Bowery in New York. A DJ boyfriend started to spin songs to play over the slides, then she developed a playlist herself. The soundtrack to The Ballad of ...”

“... tenements in which he grew up, with their high ceilings, bay windows and brightly tiled wally close (central stairwell).The school’s headmaster, Francis Newbery, was also an influence on the eventual design. His teaching methods emphasised that ‘students should be individualised as well as classified … the personality of the student should not be ...”

“... friend called Jane all his life. ‘I don’t think he had the faintest idea what laundry was,’ Frank Auerbach said. ‘He put it into this basket and it came back from Jane immaculately laundered.’ After he left school, his father took a piece of sculpture – a sandstone horse, almost two feet high, ‘three legs serving convincingly as four’ – that ...”

“... the quest of her final book.) What other things made up Fitzgerald’s ‘burden’? Well, Frank Kermode was right early on, in this paper (22 November 1979), when he noticed the fascination with water, in its many forms and depredations: damp, flood, rain, drowning, ‘the dead man’s stench of river water’, the ‘long-awaited torrents’ that ...”

“... from diaries and letters on his early relationships with Paula Banholzer (who bore his first son, Frank, killed in the Wehrmacht in 1942) and Marianne Zoff (his first wife, mother of his actress daughter Hanne Hiob) shows him by no means the gay seducer happily loving and leaving them. His attitudes at this stage, not untypical of the sexually-emancipated of ...”

“... the crisis over the Zimbabwe report, only as a familiar Lonrho ploy. In private conversation with close associates Rowland speaks of Maxwell as ‘that four-to-five’: a version of the rhyming slang for Jew, ‘four-to-two’, which rates Maxwell’s assets at from four to five million. Not at all in Rowland’s league. Let’s look at the sequence of events ...”

“... by which I donate my conscious will to a larger and unthinking not-me. The process, indeed, is close to the fictive transfer of properties that we come to know in allegories and in dreams; and there is no doubt, says Niebuhr, that this ‘combination of unselfishness and vicarious selfishness’ is the main element that goes to form the sentiment of ...”

“... Jonson articulates in ‘A Farewell to the World’ when, refusing the far-flung in favour of the close to hand, he vows to ‘make my strengths, such as they are,/Here in my bosom, and at home’. Ordinariness here is both a fit habitation for the heart and a way of using language: ‘I loved “such as they are”,’ Carey recalls nicely in An Unexpected ...”

“... barrelling through fences and running over people’s feet: ‘I would drive … real fast and close by the fans and yell obscenities at them. “Fuck you! Fucker!” They’d just sit there and smile and wave.’When Elvis shows up at Lisa Marie’s school in LA for a parent-teacher evening, the swagger is unmistakable:I knew he was coming, and I ...”

“... alarming queer by showing him to be melancholy, haunted, as solitary as he was social, with many close friendships and a few intense, complex relationships with lovers. And an artist who was exacting and ambitious and uncompromising. Perhaps the most affecting sentence in this book is the last: ‘In the morning, work.’Francis Bacon was born in Dublin in ...”

“... 19th-century illustrations of the disastrous possibilities that could befall a whaling boat at close quarters with a whale. In the best of them, the overriding sense is of physical disproportion, as if the boats and the men belong in the background of the composition but have unaccountably crept forward, becoming minuscule beside this or that part of their ...”

“... the first female party leader in German history. Kohl never forgave her. ‘I brought my assassin close to me,’ he later recalled, overlooking the gross errors of judgment by which he had precipitated his downfall. ‘I put the snake on my own arm.’ Leading the charge against Kohl was a high-risk enterprise. It could have gone horribly wrong. But ...”

“... sea, which was then many days distant, but even drew the line at going to see the River Magdalena, close enough for someone of even the feeblest geographical curiosity. Under the waving palm-trees Nuñez read the Nineteenth Century, the Economist, the Revue des Deux Mondes and that sort of thing (he was an early enthusiast for Freud’s paper on ...”