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“... Karl, the city’s leading theatre designer, lived in fashionable Charlottenburg, staged plays for Max Reinhardt, and was close friends with the artists of the Berlin Secession, for whom Robert briefly, and fecklessly, served as secretary. But he seems to have lacked even the most elementary skills in what he called ‘social instinct’. He ‘boozed ...”

“... serves as an auction house. Josephine Baker for sale: what is the continuing enthusiasm for this black American expatriate Parisian exotic dancer, and is one entitled to share it?The three faces, the three bodies, of Josephine Baker appear together on the first page of photographs in The Josephine Baker Story. At the top, in blackface, she wears an ...”

“... a monument of boredom, and the unpredictable irruptions of Wells himself – thinly disguised as Max Town, a world-famous novelist draped in furs and mistresses. Resentment against his mother dominates the novel, but there are occasional flashes of tenderness and feeling for her plight. Such flashes are largely absent from the biography, which is a book ...”

“... fully conceal. She observes ‘peacocks’ eyes of olive oil skimming atop the vinegar, dapples of black pepper and tawny streaks of mustard popped onto the biggest leaf of lettuce’. ‘Peacocks’ eyes’, ‘dapples’, ‘tawny’ – all signature notes of the mandarin sensibility of an Updike or Nabokov. Morvern’s voice has been praised for its ...”

“... ago by observing a little stroke, and I can confirm that hearing is the last sense to go before black-out. A certain self-distancing curiosity about medical, clerical, liturgical and psychological issues to do with death management doubtless has roots deeper than I care to explore, but my late father used to make a point of reading Jeremy Taylor’s ‘Holy ...”

“... have been over that ground before: no one now takes seriously the grand mythological theories of Max Müller and J. G. Frazer. The structuralism of Lévi-Strauss is of equal or even greater irrelevance for the serious scholar. There are British Classicists who adopt a position which is not far removed from my caricature of orthodoxy, but others are at least ...”

“... yesterday. Photos were taken, videos shot. Dilworth is wearing a museum-quality tweed suit. In black and white its redness would be uninhibited: the suit is a statement of seriousness. Dilworth looks like Max von Sydow, a couple of ghouls short of an exorcism. He lifts his oversize test-tube like a lightning-conducting ...”

“... displays a few infelicities: the absence of an index, which is grievous; the claim that ‘Saint Max’ in Marx’s German Ideology was Feuerbach (in fact, this was a nickname for Max Stirner); the mis-spelling of Blake’s ‘Urizen’ and other terms; the use of incomprehensible phrases such as ‘phlogiston-like ...”

“... toward it. Built in 1957, it was not as old as it looked. Above the door was an unusually small black-and-white photograph of our host, Saddam Hussein, the President or Rais of Iraq, indicating (I hope) that the churches as well as the mosques are under the protection of his secular government. An Armenian in London had warned me against travelling to ...”

“... the novels are divided into two parts, of around eight chapters each, with chiming subtitles: ‘Black Swans/White Whales’, ‘False Friends/True Enemies’, ‘Something like the Sun/Nothing like the Rain’. Part One begins with an imaginary visitor or observer – someone sitting on the top deck of a bus stuck in traffic on the street outside; a cat; a ...”

“... of 1947 Erhard abolished rationing and freed all prices: rent control was abandoned later. The black market collapsed, and goods returned to the shops. At first hardly anyone could afford to buy them, and Erhard survived a vote of confidence by only one vote. But he served an imperturbable leader. Adenauer might despise socialism but he was influenced by ...”

“... Second World War; purchases resumed in 1941, in New York, with André Breton, Howard Putzel and Max Ernst also advising. The catalogue of Guggenheim’s collection, Art of This Century, published in that year, amounted to an ‘anthology of modern art’ – that is, a sourcebook of approved models of thirty years of European avant-garde art. At the end of ...”

“...  6 January. The alterations we have been having done are now pretty much finished, thanks to Max, a young Latvian who’s unsmiling but an excellent carpenter and Eugene, much jollier and from New Zealand who has supervised it all. Walking round the job this evening R. is shocked to discover in the bathroom above the bath a crudely made wooden cross ...”

“... a distance, watching this outrageous fraud play the invisible bushman, the adept with knives, the black-faced assassin.’ ‘My own intention,’ he explains of his time in the Mekong Delta, ‘was to live not as a Vietnamese among Vietnamese but as an American among Vietnamese’, a position which leaves him feeling ...”

“... but there are also some reasonably honest witnesses. These include the stiff-backed statesman whom Max Beerbohm called ‘Britannia’s butler’, two twin widows on a Gospel quest, a get-rich-quick bride in Amazonia, a caustic spinster in India, a writer of fairy-tales, a future poet laureate teamed with a leading delineator of bosoms and bums, and a ...”