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“... up – biographers pick and choose which to believe, and hope for the best. Her handwriting was close to illegible, so quotations from Mansfield’s letters and diaries tend to be all over the place too. The title of Claire Harman’s biography, All Sorts of Lives, points to the volatility of her subject and the difficulty of her task. But at least some ...”

“... ever done on an 18th-century artist. It has been furnished with gorgeous reproductions, along with close-ups that illuminate Gillray’s care for visual detail and his uninhibited verbal wit. This account removes once and for all the question of why Gillray should have poured his enormous talent into a ‘minor art’. Henry Fielding’s Shamela – just a ...”

“... of young Jews for whom identification with an explicitly illiberal, openly racist state, led by a close ally of Donald Trump, is impossible to stomach. As Peter Beinart wrote in 2010, the Jewish establishment asked American Jews to ‘check their liberalism at Zionism’s door’, only to find that ‘many young Jews had checked their Zionism instead.’The ...”

“... the WHO, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, were to blame for the severity of the pandemic. ‘We must be frank about one of the primary reasons this outbreak spun out of control,’ Azar said.There was a failure by this organisation to obtain the information that the world needed, and that failure cost many lives … In an apparent attempt to conceal this ...”

“... private lives, on the other. The book, I said, should be revealing on all fronts, but also be frank about revelation itself. If he could not discuss a matter of importance – his son, for example, and the custody battle, or what happened in bed with the two Swedish girls – we should seek to explain why in a statement about sleaze. I said what we ...”

“... of over-cautious civil servants whom the Minister has it in his power to disregard. I write to Frank Dobson, my MP, saying, intemperately, that the Minister is more of a coward than many of the men who were executed. [I have not had a reply.] Yorkshire, 15 August. To Pateley Bridge on a lovely afternoon of flashing sunshine and rushing clouds, the drive ...”

“... city long rumoured to be Troy, which was first excavated in 1865 by the underpaid consular Brit Frank Calvert, and then on a much larger scale by the wealthy German adventurer, genius and fabulist Heinrich Schliemann. More evidence, the so-called Tawagalawa letter, from an unnamed Hatti ruler to an unnamed ruler of the Ahhiyawa, refers to a past conflict ...”

“... who feed them. In Pity the Billionaire: The Unlikely Comeback of the American Right, Thomas Frank describes a similar process in America: ‘The conservative renaissance rewrites history according to the political demands of the moment, generates thick smokescreens of deliberate bewilderment, grabs for itself the nobility of the common toiler, and ...”

“... and expert on China, a man who fascinates Steiner and whom he wanted to write about in Frank Kermode’s Modern Masters series, published in the 1970s. Steiner had first seen Needham at a protest meeting against Anglo-American intervention in Korea in 1950, at which the distinguished scientist claimed to have incontrovertible proof of the use of ...”

“... ship’ for emptying bladder rather than bowels.)Channon and Nicolson together give a close-up view of the abdication drama. In late October, Nicolson dined with Sibyl Colefax, Emerald Cunard and Laura Corrigan, hugely rich hostesses of a now vanished species, who devoted their lives to entertaining the London beau monde (Mrs Corrigan would give ...”

“... ideals and values’ in the wringer-washer on the back porch (where it usually was in Frank Capra’s films) and they came out cleansed of any taint of humiliation. We could hold our heads high again. We could reconsecrate the marriage of virtue and power. (The first-person plural was easily conflated with ‘the nation’ and ‘the ...”

“... while claiming to be totally non-political, would often express opinions that were uncomfortably close to fascism.) When I first met her Linda had been a passionate admirer of the works of Tolkien but (possibly under my influence) was now beginning to grow out of them. Such feeble scraps of elementary data were about all that Jeremy and Harriet managed to ...”

“... initiatives. Diplomatic postures have been more significant than military. Under Schröder, close ties were developed with Russia, in an entente that became the most distinctive feature of his foreign policy. But this was not a second Rapallo Pact, at the expense of western neighbours. Under Chirac and Berlusconi, France and Italy courted Putin scarcely ...”

“... every night ‘undress her before the fire … warm their bed with hot bricks, and then hold her close and kiss her, and how each morning he would warm her clothes and bring her figs and grapes and feed them to her’.Shortly after their marriage in 1879, Mabel got pregnant. She thought it was impossible to conceive except ‘at the climax moment of my ...”

“... front of our apartment, I was always jumping all over them in a passion.In Straight Life Pepper is frank – and hilarious – on the subject of his looks. Detailing his stay in an expensive detox sanitorium in Los Angeles in the mid-1950s, he recalls prinking about in the nude after getting some huge shots of morphine to mitigate the symptoms of heroin ...”