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“... winds up with a postscript set in Norwich. At a staid University Teachers of English get-together George Steiner, Frank Kermode and Seamus Heaney do their party pieces and a novelist – the author of Doctor Criminale, we must suppose – reads from his upcoming work, ‘whose ending he seems not to know’. The publisher’s blurb laconically informs us that ...”

“... soul. Years later Balzac would produce a telling portrait of the self-torturing romantic loves of George Sand, Franz Liszt and Marie d’Agoult in the (relatively little-read) novel, Béatrix. It’s hard to know who could have done justice to the upper-class intellectual-bohemian melodrama played out in and around Coppet – perhaps Goethe’s troubling ...”

“... themselves from public view, or else, as in the case of Prince John, the epileptic fifth son of George V, they were hidden away by their families. The rise of eugenics made things much worse. Eugenicists fixated on epilepsy as a hereditary threat to be tackled by both negative and positive countermeasures. By 1914, 13 US states had barred people with ...”

“... characters were not ‘real’, while – she later mocked this – the character of Sherlock Holmes, he felt, was. You might agree with Carey that Woolf misrepresents Bennett’s art, while feeling that her attack on the ‘materialism’ of the Edwardian novelists is more complicated, and simply more just, than Carey will ever allow. You might note, as ...”

“... prefer this arrangement. ‘What Congress wants isn’t power so much as deniability,’ Stephen Holmes has suggested. It is less interested in claiming a president’s successes than in disowning his failures. ‘He is sovereign​ who decides,’ in the words of the Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt, and the American president’s bomb power is one of the purest ...”

“... Protestants, but also with the anti-Englishness that shrewd observers – like the Ulster novelist George Birmingham in his The Red Hand of Ulster – recognised beneath their professions of loyalty. ‘Ulster’ is a poem of terrible power and great skill. The poem is lunatic: but it is also a very accurate report concerning Ulster Protestant fears of ...”

“... the books of other novelists – a notable example being the co-operative sleuthing of Sherlock Holmes and Freud in Nicholas Meyer’s adventure The Seven Per Cent Solution. Many American and British novelists, from Truman Capote to Piers Paul Read, have taken on the non-fiction thriller. But the benefits of fictional devices to serious non-fiction, from ...”

“... of Ayatollah Khomeini in 1989, the ‘Terrorists’ (in the French-Revolutionary rather than the George-Bushian sense) have been losing ground in Iran. The Presidencies of Hashemi Rafsanjani were a slow-motion Thermidor. Since Muhammad Khatami was elected President in a landslide in 1997, Iran has stumbled towards accommodation, first with the Arab ...”

“... Nicolae Ceausescu. There can even be cod biographies of characters that never existed: Sherlock Holmes, James Bond, Dr Who (the ‘novelised’ version of Ackroyd’s Dr Dee). This dreck is vigorously republican; it has played a major part in eroding the myth of the House of Windsor, first by hagiography and then by sleaze. Peekaboo biogs are the decadence ...”

“... been at the time (37) and prettier than she probably ever was (more on this later), is copied from George Richmond’s chalk drawing of 1850. Gaskell – the least distinctive of the three – is represented as much by her dress and slightly haughty stance as by her profile. She seems to be looking down at Patrick, though he’s a head taller. Hassall may have ...”

“... under which documents would be disclosed. When the panel asked for a computer that could access HOLMES (Home Office Large Major Enquiry System), a national police database, the Met told the panel it would cost £85,000. The Met admitted that ‘corruption’ had prevented the murder from being solved, but refused to tell the panel what that corruption ...”

“... parsing the accounts for evidence of a gigantic disaster. It’s a little like being Sherlock Holmes, crouched over and peering through his magnifying glass, looking for a smoking crater the size of Birmingham. Eventually you come across this glimmer of a clue: ‘Derivatives, assets and liabilities increased reflecting the acquisition of ABN Amro, growth ...”

“... appointed to work on Grenfell Tower, sent an email to Feilding-Mellen attaching a link to the George House flats in Kilburn which showed the cladding they wished to use. ‘It uses the same brushed aluminium material and finish proposed for Grenfell Tower, but folded into cladding cassettes which conceal almost all fixings.’ Feilding-Mellen replied to ...”