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“... questions. Economy of the Unlost is a compact yet supple series of essays (first aired in the Martin Classical Lectures series delivered annually at Oberlin College) complementing her previous long essay on a classical theme, Eros the Bittersweet (1986). Erudite and entertaining, effortlessly able to play across a range of associations, the book traces a ...”

“... an Arsenal tattoo. On the morning Arsène Wenger announced his retirement, my wife came into the kitchen and asked if I’d booked my flight yet. I’m not a huge reader of football autobiographies, though, and I’m not sure why anyone who isn’t a fan would read one (or read a piece about one, for that matter). I wouldn’t read Ferguson’s or Clough’s ...”

“... modern taste. ‘How to Clump my Avenues,’ he wondered in his notes, ‘How to Fence the Kitchen Garden, south Border etc, Whether the Road to the House would not be better Higher Up … consult about Water in the park … which kind of Evergreens for the W Front?’ These were the questions he intended to put to Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown, then ...”

“... between 6 a.m. and whenever the kids woke up, she wrote, and then typed up her ideas at the kitchen table, ‘with the noise of children coming in and out and banging the doors’. She sent her stories out on a Tuesday and received her rejections by Friday for years, until Richard Crossman, who had become editor of the New Statesman in 1970 after six ...”

“... history, Ireland’s reputation abroad. Maps, photocopies, ledgers and certificates littered the kitchen table. Over the course of an hour, two people rang Corless’s mobile, looking for female relatives who may have been in the Tuam Mother and Baby Home. They might already have asked the nuns and the county council and the Health Board, but even babies ...”

“... Jews in Germany. Her older sister, Ilse Braun, worked as a receptionist for a Jewish doctor called Martin Marx, who fled to the States in 1938. We don’t know what Eva thought of this, one way or another, though after the war Ilse claimed that her sister objected to the ‘impossibility of our having two such opposite jobs’. The three Braun girls were ...”

“... what was Wright’s legacy? The split-level ranch house, Gill says. Open planning perhaps, the kitchen as part of the living space, bands of windows and glass doors opening onto patios – these have formal beginnings in the Oak Park prairie houses, and practical realisation in the small Usonian houses. Wright’s other innovations established a style for ...”

“... no down payment, but who could possibly afford to heat that many bedrooms, bathrooms and a huge kitchen? Too far from Boston and the larger Massachusetts and New Hampshire cities to commute to work, and with the long, cold winters making them undesirable vacation homes, they made no sense except to the banks and construction companies. Some claimed that ...”

“... including two Gainsboroughs, three Rubenses, four Guardis and Velázquez’s earliest known work, Kitchen Maid with the Supper at Emmaus. The whole thing was over in less than fifteen minutes. As was widely reported at the time, the group’s leader struck both of the Beits as enormously composed and in control, with an unfaltering eye for the most valuable ...”

“... gridiron or to ‘the iron beds of Phnom Pen’, ‘the same stuff I am made from’: Here in my kitchen I am forced to look and listen. I cannot ignore it. Several things here get up the reader’s nose. There is the implication that while the sensitive poet in her kitchen is forced to look and listen, we in ours are too ...”

“... over to the queue marked Computer Sciences, leaving Midgley faced with Mr Horsfall and Martin. Mr Horsfall did not dye his hair nor wear an earring. His hair was now fashionably short but only because he had never got round to wearing it fashionably long. Nor had his son Martin ever ventured under the drier; his ...”

“... which reminded FitzGerald of Fifties television commercials: ‘a family at breakfast in a sunlit kitchen, the two tow-headed children clamouring for Sugar Pops or Tastee Treats – a suburban idyll with sparkling linoleum and perfect teeth’. It was also a world of patriarchal values, with strict prohibitions against ...”

“... didn’t make it onto the stage until Monday morning; most of the crowd had already left. With Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy assassinated, Nixon in the White House, the Salt I treaty still a few years off and nearly half a million troops in Vietnam, three of those memorable turns were in ‘protest’ mode: Havens’s sampling of the 19th-century ...”

“... an alliance of local notables, not a mass organisation. The Democratic Party’s true father is Martin Van Buren, the son of a tavern-keeper and the only president who grew up speaking a language other than English (Dutch). In the 1820s, Van Buren made the party a powerful electoral machine complete with a network of local newspapers, regular nominating ...”

“... Fox never discusses her second marriage, which also produced children, or her current husband, Martin Greenberg, a former editor of Commentary and brother of Clement Greenberg. And while the later pages of the book are sprinkled with famous names – John Barrymore, Burl Ives and Frank Sinatra all have walk-on parts – the only literary figure who appears ...”