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“... he does not call these pieces poems.’ From the heart of the London literary establishment Sir John Squire described The Waste Land as a poem for which ‘a grunt would serve equally well.’ Eliot’s 1925 collection, which included ‘Gerontion’, seemed to Squire ‘obscure so inconsequent . . . Why on earth he bothers to write at all is difficult to ...”

“... the taxi-driver – who else? – of the death of the American Ambassador. It was August 1968, and John Gordon Mein had been assassinated that morning. This was an abrupt introduction to the complexities of Guatemalan politics, and I merely assumed – with the Vietnam War and the less-publicised Guatemalan guerrilla war of the Sixties well underway – that ...”

“... starve me out,’ he said, ‘they’ being probably not only his ex-friends at Emmanuel but F.L. Lucas, especially detested for being at King’s and associated with Bloomsbury, and E.M.W. Tillyard of Jesus, an inveterate and skilful enemy. So his life was often a series of fights, under Cambridge rules, but he could probably conceive of no ...”

“... account for most of the population of Patagonia) but the Scotch – fortified, according to Lucas Bridges, with a sense of moral rectitude that they were sparing them the indignities of civilisation.’ This observation brings me to the prompt for my own back-country tourism. I was in pursuit of my Scottish great-grandfather Arthur Sinclair, from ...”

“... provided much of the rationale for deregulation; the second wave of free-market economists (Robert Lucas, for example, or Gary Becker), who took apart the field of macroeconomics in favour of game theory, behavioural economics, rational expectations and other individualist approaches; and journalists like George Gilder and Jude Wanniski who recast the market ...”

“... scene that has no source either in ancient accounts or in Graves’s narrative, he has Caligula (John Hurt) take on the guise of Jupiter and cut the baby Drusilla is carrying from her belly and – on the model of some versions of divine gestation and paternity in Greco-Roman myth – eat the foetus. The ‘Caesarian’ itself was not shown on screen, but ...”

“... bullshit, his own as well as others’. In the 16th century most of these men were Spanish. Lucas Vázquez de Ayllón was fifty when the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V mandated his expedition to Chicora, in present-day South Carolina, which slave raiders claimed was a ‘New Andalusia’. Ayllón funded the voyage himself, banking on future ...”

“... as a way of allowing honourable men to stay in office without appearing to want to do so. John Nott offered his resignation after the Falklands invasion but he allowed himself to be persuaded by Mrs Thatcher to stay in office. William Whitelaw has written that he wanted to resign as Home Secretary after an intruder had entered the Queen’s bedroom in ...”

“... profession and the other asylums of London (especially Hoxton) when necessary. Lamb’s brother John had urged him not to take on this task: it was typical of Lamb to say that he understood John’s reasons for saying this, and thought no less of him for it, while disregarding his advice. The history of the fate of insane ...”

“... Reformed Protestantism is often called Calvinism, after the French Reformer John Calvin, but that is a mistake; the Reformed had many and varied leaders and thinkers of significance, and one of the things that annoyed the Reformed about Lutheranism was its idolisation of the single figure of Martin Luther. There was good reason for ...”

“... in debt, had a near-death experience. In 2005, Alain Senderens, of the three-star Paris restaurant Lucas Carton, handed back his Michelin stars, following the example set in London by Nico Ladenis and bad-boy star-chef Marco Pierre White. The burden was too much, and the economics didn’t compute. Convinced that Michelin requires a soigné ambience, Senderens ...”

“... Alvarez, he addresses the cult of Sylvia Plath, and his sense of having colluded in it. Writing to Lucas Myers (14 February 1987), he says that Plath managed to present her ‘diabolical streak’ as the voice of her suffering and martyrdom:And protecting Aurelia, I colluded – and promoted the cult which interpreted my continued silence in the blazing ...”

“... rather Buñuelesque) by Duff C. and Lady W. being so middle-aged and ultra respectable. John Julius Norwich puts his father’s sexual success down to his ability to write bad sonnets to his lady-friends but one wonders if it was a more basic attraction. The moustache is hardly a plus, the photograph on the book jacket making him look like a 1940s ...”

“... laying waste to peasants’ homes or to whole villages in Flemish works by Gillis Mostaert, Lucas van Valckenborch and others before 1600, or by Sebastiaen Vrancx and Roelandt Savery after that, all of whom made a speciality of the theme. Later Dutch painters created more realistic landscapes for it, with fewer figures used for a more focused drama in ...”

“... the communal kitchen is ill-fated Ruth, with her plait down her back. In the car the mystic madman Lucas Simmonds is eternally interfering with Marcus. And Stephanie, suffering from ‘an excess of exact imagination’, exerting her whole will to bring her family together, is wrestling with the slithering Christmas turkey in its dish.It is in part a response ...”