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“... doubt that Volkov’s book is substantially a fabrication. Laurel Fay herself delivered the coup de grâce in a meticulous piece of scholarship published in a collection of largely sceptical essays, A Shostakovich Casebook, edited by Malcolm Hamrick Brown, in 2004. Elizabeth Wilson sides with Fay, while observing with regret that ‘the so-called ...”

“... only Cuban matters but those of all nations came into Castro’s critique, from the insufficient de-Nazification of West Germany to French atrocities in Algeria. In later decades, his speeches would become gruelling national rituals, but almost to the end they remained a reliable point of resistance to US triumphalism.Castro’s exit​ from New York was ...”

“... by E.C. Bentley, the inventor of the form: ‘He said, “if anyone calls/Say I’m designing St Paul’s’ (a building which he completed in 1710). Hill’s poem lives locally in these small, self-delighting verbal graces that can have the air of deft contrivance or happy accident, while its more momentous and even ominous compulsions work themselves out ...”

“... of all observers, owner of arguably the best-known entirely plain face in the world, the richest man on the planet: Bill Gates III. According to Cringely, top-level computer jocks are always, without exception, either hippies or nerds; the lank-haired, anal-retentive, oversized-glasses-wearing, non-fantastically-good-at-teeth-brushing Gates is the apotheosis ...”

“... radical heretics? Spinoza was a republican democrat and a supporter of the politician Johan De Witt (1625-72), an opponent of the House of Orange. After De Witt’s death, the aristocratic Orange faction took power and restored a more conventional social order (which was subsequently imposed on Britain when one of ...”

“... by that old stand-by called, ‘ambivalence’; a more generous view of Carl Schorske’s Fin-de-Siècle Vienna (1980), or indeed Robert Musil’s The Man without Qualities, might have yielded a more abundant answer. On the other hand, Freud’s warm if critical admiration of England (which, he ...”

“... an itinerant singer whom he had invited into his hotel for a drink. The waiters sneered at the man and put the couple in a room by themselves, away from the hotel guests. Earlier, Tolstoy had been incensed by the fact that the public had listened to the singing, but then turned away without giving the performer any money. The singer himself proved to be ...”

“... replying in 1915 to a letter from Karl Schwarzschild, was ‘unaware that he was writing to a dead man’. It’s a true statement – if Einstein had known he was writing to a dead man he would presumably have stopped – but the piquant hint of mystery is misleading. Schwarzschild was commanding an artillery unit on the ...”

“... They steep us in the decors of revivalism, from the marmoreal bondieuseries of Ary Scheffer and Paul Delaroche to the pity-inducing poor folk engraved by Gustave Doré. Sustained by these and by the louring atmospheric landscapes of the Hague School – Goupil & Co’s version of ‘modern painting’ – van Gogh forged himself a personal ...”

“... and Churchill at the Anfa Conference in Casablanca; in 1945, aged fifteen, he was decorated by de Gaulle. Not long after his coronation he was welcomed in Washington by President Kennedy; France, for its part, had high hopes that he would manage its postcolonial interests in the Maghreb – he was known to be astute and an implacable adversary.He had been ...”

“... or adopts an idiom that might have been drawn from Vogue (fog a ‘fishnet plissé’ or ‘peau de soie’, the sea ‘velouté’ or ‘suede’), she rightly prefers the term ‘outdoorsydomestic’, which nicely catches her trick of presenting the great outdoors in indoor terms. In ‘The Cove’, for example, we see her looking out at the eiders, trig ...”

“... now they are all one family. ‘I am a biological mother to one, a stepmother to the other, and a de facto mother in general to both of them.’ The characters don’t have names. Interspersed with this story are excerpts from a fictional book the adult narrator has brought along to read on the trip. It is called Lost Children Elegies and is written by an ...”

“... who passed from a hardscrabble youth through the halls of the meritocracy to become a rich man on the earnings of his fiction. Note the defensive modesty of the epitaph Updike suggested for himself: ‘Here lies a small-town boy who tried to make the most out of what he had, who made up with diligence what he might have lacked in brilliance.’ The ...”

“... Joyce turns Carroll into a minor avatar of his dodgy hero, Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker, a man more sinned against than sinning surely, but also a little closer to sin than he will ever admit. That’s what the fall’s all about, we might say, whether it’s Humpty Dumpty’s (the figure from the nursery rhyme, not the philosopher of Through the ...”

“... owned by the Chinese company Dalian Wanda, whose founder, Wang Jianlin, is the richest man in China, indeed in the whole of Asia. One Nine Elms is their first property in Europe. The building will feature two huge towers, and will loom over the other tall buildings in its penumbra. This new area is, in planner-speak, known as VNEB, for Vauxhall ...”