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“... of John and Jane Beegan. In 1901 they were living together with the younger Beegans, Mary and Thomas, at 23 Dunlo Hill in Ballinasloe. On the census form, John Beegan senior describes himself and his two sons, John Leo and Thomas, as stonecutters. Ten years later, in the 1911 census, he chose the term ‘monumental ...”

“... of Carpenter’s best stories, Auden’s marriage and more particularly its immediate aftermath. Thomas Mann’s daughter Erika – who though once-married was not very likely to marry again – was a cabaret artiste whose heroically anti-Nazi material had lost her her German passport, and who therefore approached the nearest Englishman, Christopher ...”

“... critic, having assured Elena that anyone who finds her novel risqué is an idiot who hasn’t read Henry Miller, gets drunk and assaults her in a lift. Meanwhile, Elena’s university friends are too caught up in workers’ rights to take her novel seriously. As one classmate puts it, ‘You did everything possible, right? But this, objectively, is not the ...”

“... the reformer Granville Sharp prosecuted a man named Stapylton who had taken his runaway slave, Thomas Lewis, forcibly on board ship. The trial judge, Lord Mansfield, tried to evade the moral issue by directing the jury that the case depended simply on whether Lewis was Stapylton’s property. The jury returned a verdict that Lewis was not, but Mansfield ...”

“... or no danger to the country. If asked, in fact, they would probably agree with the philosopher Thomas Nagel, who has said that you cannot trust a person who never lies about sex. The case against Clinton was also doomed by pervasive hypocrisy. The media that thrives on sex and violence postured shamelessly as Clinton’s moral judge. Some ...”

“... away from his earlier uncertain styles, which were close enough to Auden and Yeats and Dylan Thomas to be called vaguely Modernist, even faintly distractive. The speech he found was in direct contrast: a weighty, easy and conversable social intimacy, occasionally spoken of later by critics in terms of the British bar parlour. And certainly, this was one ...”

“... retold (they have been best explained before in instructional texts, like Disney animators Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnson’s wonderful but technical The Illusion of Life: Disney Animation), and even hard-to-follow business dealings are presented with something approaching the same intensity. (I found myself in a state of acute anxiety at several points ...”

“... immigrants from Eastern Europe. The name he chose has often been said to be a tribute to Dylan Thomas, but it seems he first thought of it as ‘Dillon’, possibly after the hard-bitten Dodge City lawman Matt Dillon, hero of the TV Western Gunsmoke. He was twenty years old, skinny and scruffy in jeans and a ‘Huck Finn cap’. In an early article in the ...”

“... between ‘When the evening is spread out against the sky’ (line 2 of ‘Prufrock’) and Thomas Hardy’s ‘forms there flung/Against the sky’ (‘The Abbey Mason’); between ‘certain half-deserted streets’ (line 4 of ‘Prufrock’) and ‘he sought out a certain street and number’ in Chapter 20 of Little Dorrit; or, moving beyond ...”

“... Walser? (Ooooh errrg blush, ahem, little cough, um: No, I’m ashamed to say . . .) Had I read Thomas Bernhard? (Yes! – Yes, I have! ‘Wittgenstein’s Nephew’! Yay! Yippee! Wow! Phew! – dodged the bullet that time!) It seemed, for a while at least, that I had yet to be contaminated by the shocking intellectual mediocrity surrounding me at Stanford ...”

“... on all the islands in the mid-Atlantic on the way. I had two volumes of the collected works of Thomas Balogh in my luggage, required reading for progressive Latin American economists, as well as a small Stilton cheese in a china jar. This had been purchased at Fortnum and Mason, on the recommendation of my Chilean friend Claudio Véliz, the Latin American ...”

“... religious meetings, dying in filthy prisons. Defoe was particularly upset by the death in jail of Thomas Delaune, his wife and two children, and he blamed his community for not supporting them. When the Duke of Monmouth landed at Lyme Regis on 11 June 1685, to begin his rebellion against his uncle, the new Catholic monarch, James II, Defoe left his young ...”

“... in films and on television. It is true that a number of influential mavericks – from Nabokov and Henry Miller to William Burroughs, James Baldwin, Philip Roth and the Beats – had been chipping away at the old taboos. But it still took courage to challenge the stultifying pieties of middlebrow culture. Being a woman didn’t help. (Does it ever?) Over the ...”

“... Living next door to it – literally – was all the harder. I was reminded of the words Henry II uttered about Thomas à Becket: ‘Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest.’ He didn’t order his knights to go and kill Becket, but they believed they had his blessing to do so.Now that sounds like ...”

“... dragged by a restless father from city to city, from hotel to rented quarters. As with William and Henry James, this life apart from their peers would be the making of Borges as an artist, but it would mean that his life, when he returned to Argentina, would be more complicated. Once more, school was a nightmare since he did not speak the same language as his ...”