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“... plays cockney wideboys in British gangster flicks. Xan – who shares his surname with Duane Meo, John Self’s ‘whizzkid editor’ in Money – is sardonically described as a ‘Renaissance Man’: he has published a short story collection called Lucozade, and plays rhythm guitar in a Camden café ‘every second Wednesday’. His old man, Mick Meo ...”

“... But the remark was not as self-deprecating as it looks. It was among other things an allusion to John Stuart Mill, who had opened his own very celebrated Autobiography with a similar disclaimer: he had nothing to offer, he said, apart from an account of the origin and growth of his philosophical convictions, and ‘the reader whom these things do not ...”

“... readers of the previous generation had addressed to poetry. He drew on eclectic older critics like John Holloway, Ian Watt and, above all, Frank Kermode – many of his circle, he reports, ‘were covert Kermodians inasmuch as we regarded him as the most accomplished literary critic of his generation’ – but also on outliers of American formalism such as ...”

“... be at the actual scene of the killing to be found guilty and sent to jail,’ Detective Inspector John McFarlane said after the conviction of 17 of the 20 young people jointly charged with the murder of 15-year-old Sofyen Belamouadden at Victoria Station in March 2010: ‘the law on joint enterprise is clear and unforgiving.’ To be found guilty of murder as ...”

“... chemistry dominate both Holmes’s history and the period itself, but Holmes is interested too in John Herschel, William’s son, who nearly became a lawyer instead of the founder of the Astronomical Society; in Nevil Maskelyne, the astronomer royal at the Greenwich Observatory; in Mungo Park, the African explorer and the first European to reach the Niger; in ...”

“... Montaigne, but was curiously silent about his many thefts from Burton. They were first spotted by John Ferriar, a Manchester physician, who in 1793 published a sympathetic but puzzled essay on Sterne’s indebtedness to the Anatomy: ‘I do not mean to treat him as a Plagiarist,’ he writes. ‘I wish to illustrate’ – to celebrate – ‘not to degrade ...”

“... I heard that Lee Meng had been caught and condemned to hang. All appeals had failed. Dingle Foot was leading a campaign in Britain to save her, so I caught a train to London and told him this tale. Could I prove it? I could not. Did I know the marine’s name? I didn’t. Although my attempt to help was futile, the campaign went on. Then, quite ...”

“... tell me.26 January. We are comfortably ensconced in our Weekend First seats at King’s Cross when John Bercow comes along the platform. Not quite the elegant, slightly flamboyant figure one sees in the Commons, he’s in a scruffy suede jacket and, according to the trolley attendant, sitting in standard class, where he is happy to have a conversation about ...”

“... display the arc of a ball’s flight from the moment it’s struck to its distant landing. Golf, John Updike wrote, is of all games ‘the most mystical, the least earthbound, the one wherein the wall between us and the supernatural is rubbed thinnest’. I’m not sure about that. To witness (or in the unlikely event execute) a decisive action in pretty ...”

“... and wisps of sandy hair. To the soldiers he was ‘Twinkle-toes’, from the way he dragged one foot when he walked. He could be quick-tempered when he detected inefficiency, and, in matters of discipline, he upheld the severest sentences. Normally he was soft-spoken, and it was with the dreamiest of gestures that, his eyelids partly closed against the ...”

“... come and gone like shadows – Jim, the soccer star, had vanished, And Joe, the pensive one, and John, of calculus the gloomy hero … She flirted and procrastinated, toyed superficially with love, but in her heart awaited more. 16 Inevitably comes the day; He’s leaving, the ethereal friend: the bill is paid, exams are done with, the tennis racket in its ...”

“... about to take over the known world. Until a month ago, the United States seemed unable to put a foot wrong. Then it, too, showed ominous signs of faltering. Can Japan’s mysterious ailment, whatever it is, be spreading? Japan came third last in the OECD’s table of industrialised and would-be industrialised member nations’ growth for 1999, with 0.2 per ...”

“... one point he issued a fatwa justifying the murder of Christians, to make it possible for his young foot-soldiers to fund their jihad by killing and robbing Coptic businessmen with a clear conscience. In 1993, in New York, his followers detonated a massive van bomb in the basement car park of the World Trade Center, gouging a 200 ...”

“... wild, wick slip she was – but, she had the bonniest eye, and sweetest smile, and lightest foot in the parish; and, after all, I believe she meant no harm; for when once she made you cry in good earnest, it seldom happened that she would not keep you company; and oblige you to be quiet that you might comfort her.A confident new female voice lets rip ...”

“... of Linear Elamite. Afterwards, the keeper of the Middle East department at the British Museum, John Curtis, mentioned that he knew the Mahboubian family and could make an introduction. It took four years of cajoling but eventually the family agreed to withdraw the silver vessels from a safe deposit box for Desset to examine.Desset is adamant that without ...”