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“... was six but I thought I knew what she meant. I had these friends, the Routledge twins: Andrew and Peter. My own two Christian names, as it happened, but divided up like that I didn’t recognise them as mine. Andrew was quiet and cautious, Peter quick and reckless. They lived on a mucky farm nearby; you turned out of the ...”

“... school, which Eatwell and Milgate disparage. Their zeal in detecting the neoclassical worm in the rose of prevailing Keynesian interpretations is noteworthy. Eatwell is particularly scathing about the assimilation of Keynes’s ideas to a kind of theorising where investment is determined simply by expectations and the interest rate. This is, he writes, ‘as ...”

“... early interlude) at what was the Ministry of Labour and is now the Department of Employment. He rose from being Ernest Bevin’s private secretary to Permanent Under-Secretary. He observed the whole story of governments’ relations with the trade unions during the post-war period from the inside. During the most fateful of those years, the ones which saw ...”

“... Powell did not simply change party, in the way that an ordinary politician occasionally does. He rose above party with a licence granted by his own elevated sense of self. That he allowed nobody to forget his eminence as a classicist was one aspect of this. His readiness to engage with critics was another. When Paul Foot, in preparation for The Rise of Enoch ...”

“... in the concertante solo violin part of Heldenleben, just as Benjamin Britten’s dependence upon Peter Pears, the sharer of his bed, shines through most of his later music. Susana Gil alighted upon the gossip circuit of musical Europe as a living anachronism. ‘By God, William is going to marry a native,’ said one of Walton’s friends when the eminent ...”

“... of those the lazier could write off as ‘la-di-dah’. Her brother pipesmoked greenfly off each rose in summer linen coat and Panama. Hard-faced traders tore her room apart. Litter and lavender in ransacked drawers, the yearly programmes for the D’Oyly Carte. ‘Three Little Maids’ she’d marked with ‘4 encores!’ Encore! No more. A distant ...”

“... provides Homecoming’s starting point, its narrative core. The novel opens with a young boy, Peter Debauer, the narrator, shunted – as Schlink was – between his home in Germany and his Swiss grandparents, alighting on an unfinished novel that tells the story of a soldier who returns from the war, only to find his wife living with another man. His ...”

“... say you wrote a 400-page novel in order to let your mother know you were gay. This was L’Étoile rose, published in 1978, polemical, didactic and occasionally soupy. The narrator, David, welcomes the arrival of the word ‘gay’ in France from America, comparing it to the dove returning to Noah’s Ark with its message of hope, though he admits it hasn’t ...”

“... Last week, in another part of the city, a human head turned up.’ The severed head which opens Peter Conrad’s first novel suggests that contemporary fiction might be defined by its increasing convergence with the weird tale, the story based on a deliberate disruption of the natural order. The head is anonymous, sealed in a plastic bag, and being used as a football by a group of boys ...”

“... non-Jewish middle class. Nor did all Jews fit the rational-liberal stereotype. Some, like the poet Peter Altenberg, would have been more at home in the Place Pigalle. Others, like Friedrich Eckstein – typically, the university-educated son of an industrialist – moved from vegetarian Wagnerism through theosophy to the occultism that in Vienna became the ...”

“... smart to take proper note of his elders and betters. Commending a recent Prom performance of the Peter Grimes Sea Interludes, a Guardian music critic remarked that the ‘Moonlight’ interlude formed a link with Elgar, whose First Symphony was also played at the concert. At the same time he regretted that the Grimes Passacaglia wasn’t included. Earlier ...”

“... 13 January. One of Peter Cook’s jokes, several times quoted in his obituaries, is of two men chatting. ‘I’m writing a novel,’ says one, whereupon the other says: ‘Yes, neither am I.’ And of course it’s funny and has a point, except that Peter, I suspect, felt that this disposed of the matter entirely ...”

“... qualification. Thus in one speech, ‘the subordinate clauses hung like candelabra.’ He rose above mere lucidity with his ‘still rarer gift of keeping his meaning convoluted and often obscure, yet making his presentation of it compelling and persuasive’. It follows that, although Gladstone increasingly realised that reports in the cheap ...”

“... the Bull of Revesby). His wife was 9 stone 6 in 1781 and 13 stone 12 in 1794. His sister Sophia rose from 11 stone 8 in 1778 to 14 stone 3 in 1794. When Banks was well into his seventies a drunken coachman overturned the carriage in which this substantial trio were travelling. ‘We were obliged,’ Banks wrote, ‘to lie very uneasily at the bottom of the ...”

“... physical effect on her. Diodorus Siculus, the first-century BCE historian, adds that the pneuma rose from beneath her, from a vent or chasm, and that it was the odd behaviour of goats near the vent that first alerted locals to its existence. This evidence suggests that the Pythia gave her responses while in a trancelike state induced by the mysterious ...”