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“... Mairbh, the step of the dead. Island tradition has it that an English officer walked along this stone plank, jeered at by his recently-wedded wife who mocked his hesitation until, as he reached the end, the stone broke and he fell to his death. Across the water, in Connemara, where the Irish name for the ...”

“... career as the avatar of the good and the not-so-good, still travelling in the wake of Little Richard. The history of rock ’n’ roll focuses on the white triumvirate – Presley, Buddy Holly and Jerry Lee Lewis, who have at different times heaped contumely on themselves – neglecting its roots in Jazz and the Blues, and a sibling relationship with ...”

“... pores were dilated; that frequent intercourse opened the passages and was therefore good for the stone; and that if you had a pain in your cods you should avoid chills. Common sense about these sorts of things did not necessarily have to filter down from medical experts to laity, since such knowledge might be an authentic possession of lay culture. In early ...”

“... fiction. What she dreamed of escaping to is hard to say. One of the problems faced by Richard Mabey in his biography of Thompson, Dreams of the Good Life, is that Lark Rise to Candleford and its sequel, Heatherley, which wasn’t published until 1979, are almost the only sources we have. By the time she came to write them, the intervening years ...”

“... and Ruland do not deviate at all, as far as I can tell, from the authorised version. They leave no stone turned in the search for new contexts and new assessments. This predictability has to be attributed, in part at least, to the inadequacy of the paradigm: the identification of American literature with a curiously unchanging modernity. The willingness of ...”

“... stark boldness.’ Chesterton’s fascist aesthetic had triumphed. But by the time the foundation stone was laid in July 1929, A.K. had left a town that, as he’d written a few months before, was ‘smarting from the forthrightness of my tongue and pen’.In the absence of the theatre’s papers, the reason for his departure can only be guessed. There had ...”

“... Pazzi and Rucellai families of their position as clients of the Medici. Some contributors, like Richard Goldthwaite (on consumer demand) and Bill Kent (on ties of neighbourhood), write well about topics on which they have already written elsewhere. Others break new ground, notably Ronald Weissman on ‘Mediterranean Values and Renaissance Society’ and ...”

“... private secretary is given a family set of rooms in Albany where, ‘coming in off the chilly stone staircase, Maxim and Agnes had walked through a time gate, back seventy-five years to the days when the Empire was built of solid dark mahogany and pictures of dead animals.’ A Secret Service chief disappears in Joseph Hone’s The Flowers of the Forest ...”

“... in American Africans in Ghana (2006), visitors or residents included Maya Angelou, Malcolm X, Richard Wright, Martin Luther King, Adam Clayton Powell, George Padmore, C.L.R. James and more. Frantz Fanon wrote much of The Wretched of the Earth in Ghana, and the year before Ali’s visit, W.E.B. DuBois died and was buried in Accra. In February 1964 Cassius ...”

“... now-failing button company) to the rich, self-satisfied, and extremely right-wing (even pro-Nazi) Richard Griffen. (Griffen is one of Atwood’s regular griffins, one might say, the monstrous male.) Richard is referred to by his enemies as ‘Mr Royal Classic’ – he is the owner of a successful firm called Royal Classic ...”

“... is entered from the north; after a tortuous dusty ascent from Dhar, the road squeezes between two stone bastions and enters through the Delhi Darwaza, or Delhi Gate, where the remains of inset blue enamel can be seen on the dilapidated sandstone archways. Up this road and through this gate, on a day in late August or early September 1617, came the eccentric ...”

“... of an immense ribbon of landlocked supporters of a ship’s mutiny stretching out along a jetty, stone lions waking into the promise of tomorrow, and so on. Allegory galore. It’s not that the images don’t say these things. They say them and more, and they do something that isn’t really saying at all. Let’s look at the opening of the film. Or let’s ...”

“... in either medium could achieve. Gillray’s first ambition was to be a reproductive engraver (Richard Godfrey suggests in the catalogue that he failed because he could never avoid exaggerating, if only a little). He possessed a combination of technical abilities which no modern caricaturist can match: a good grasp of anatomy, a fine way with drawn drapery ...”

“... lies an important earlier collection, the work published in 1972, edited by Peter Laslett and Richard Wall, as Household and Family in Past Time. This book established the remarkable constancy of average household size in England since the 16th century, despite people’s mobility, with a norm of a little under five persons until the low birth rate and ...”

“... Clover (whose name always puts me in mind of an overworked pit pony). And there in the grass is a stone slab, bearing the names and dates of birth of Vidal and his lifelong companion Howard Austen. The hyphens that come after the years (1925 and 1928 respectively) lie like little marble asps, waiting to keep their dates. Who knows what decided the cemetery ...”