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“... building the city required transporting and placing ‘an estimated two thousand tons of volcanic rock every year for at least three to four centuries without the benefit of pulleys, levels, metal tools or wheels’.The Saudeleurs worshipped a god called Nahnisohnsapw. Nahnisohnsapw’s medium on earth was a saltwater eel, Nahn Samwohl (a very eel-like ...”

“... a fungoid growth or eruption used as an image for the progress of love. A civil servant called David, his grey hair dyed, has come to visit his ex-wife, Stella: he brings with him his new partner, Catherine, but he is already sick of her and obsessed with a third woman, the pleasingly trollopy Dina. David accompanies ...”

“... pointy teeth, all at once so English, so ordinary and so glamorous. And it’s four decades since David Bowie – wearing a lot of make-up and very few clothes, grinning through his pointy teeth, all at once so English, so ordinary and so glamorous – released The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. ‘Five years, that’s all we’ve ...”

“... how carefully Lawrence refuses to recognise virtue in anyone but himself’), and his sponsor David Pryce-Jones now finds F.R. Leavis much the same, so it may be legitimate to cite the famous excoriation of Bloomsbury that was voiced by Lawrence and amplified by Leavis: ‘they talked endlessly, but endlessly – and never, never a good thing said. They ...”

“... Somalis. I don’t hear my first bullet in Mogadishu until late afternoon. I’m standing with David Shearer, field director of the Save the Children Fund, on the flat roof of the SCF staff house, hardly troubled by the thought that we’re both crisply silhouetted against the skyline. At the report, I flinch – no, I jump. I look at Shearer and see that ...”

“... ads: the posters of girls whose tresses became rivers; the Medusa-like transfigurations of our rock idols, those tousled Monica Lewinskies with hair on their chests. Only it wasn’t quite ‘rock’ in those days – and certainly not while Syd Barrett, the master of whimsy, was floating around on the English pop ...”

“... In late​ 2016, David Sedaris attended a piano recital delivered by his longtime partner, Hugh. Hugh had practised with obsessive intensity for many hours a day, but ultimately performed poorly, disappointing himself in front of a room full of his fellow students and their parents. ‘I’ve never seen him so vulnerable,’ Sedaris wrote that night in his diary, excerpted here in a second curated volume of entries, which he has said are a small fraction of the nearly ten million words he has ‘handwritten or typed’ as part of this project since 1977 ...”

“... hurts so) possibly be the same thing as insensate molecules rushing around in nerve fibres?’ David Papineau asks. Good question; but one that seems, much like the broom tree, to slip away even as one tries to grasp it. Witness passages like this: There is, of course, a rather different reason for doubting that the semantic power of ‘quasi-phenomenal ...”

“... the way banking has changed, become more intense, more time-consuming and more overtly greedy. David Kynaston, author of a magisterial four-volume history of the City, completed in 2001, observes at the start of the fourth volume that ‘the modern City is in many ways a cruel, heartless place, and its occupants work such cripplingly long hours that ...”

“... the Brunswick concert, by its very nature, acquired a significance denied to the international rock concert with which the same anniversary was simultaneously being commemorated in Dortmund (under the auspices of the German TUC). While the Dortmund concert would have been an ideal partner to the Warsaw one in the eyes of the media, its political objectives ...”

“... a centimetre’s span a baboon or a frog or a duck or a boar’s head (cat. 18) and a jar in rock crystal 9 cm high (cat. 17). They are pieces which exemplify the genius of Mediterranean art of that period for working hard, highly polished materials. And this is very relevant to the series of figures which dominate the Egyptian section. They are ...”

“... there was any set-up behind the furore of 2022, but the weird spat between Will Smith and Chris Rock was a response to red carpet mania – sooner or later some kind of violence was going to be committed there. A few years ago we would have taken it for granted that an altercation like that was real. But today we are more wary over public show. With ...”

“... might even once have enjoyed a toke. Now Blair and supporters are apeing him exactly: the wannabe rock band, the pose astride a motorbike, the whole yoof thing. That, as Bill would say, is a ‘bridge’. Inside, the club is warm with steam and smoke; and a lot of people, a lot of voters, arms aloft throughout the night – manic, toxic dancing. In one ...”

“... from the mental pressure of it all, but if so, the reprieve was temporary. In December 1966 he hit rock bottom. He was ‘extraordinarily depressed’, unable to get up in the morning, condemned by his ‘outsider’ status to writing endless ‘hopeless letters’, leading nowhere but the hollowed-out ‘void’ in which he now finds himself. All the evidence ...”

“... as many of the Moon Men, and a few other Apollo astronauts, as were willing to talk to him, though David Scott of Apollo 15 has become a recluse, Armstrong doesn’t do interviews, and while John Young of Apollo 16 made a speech at Smith, both eye and mind contact seemed impossible for him. None of them found celebrity easy, least of all the crew of Apollo ...”