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“... in order to get on the road to Waterloo. The church felt proudly ecumenical, as much mosque as white Catholic periscope. The ascent, with spindly handrails, grids of shadow and a looming bell, recalled Hitchcock’s Vertigo. The cold tower was tight and claustrophobic and we struggled to identify the jigsaw of communes through the slats of giant ...”

“... poor Steve, he just has no sense of humour.”’ It was Babitz who put Martin in the white suit that became his trademark.Her preoccupation with getting it right didn’t make her a perfectionist. ‘I have never liked perfect things, they give me the creeps.’ She accosts a man from New York: ‘How can you look like this? You’re so ...”

“... Frederick and Elizabeth’s reign in Bohemia lasted only a year: military defeat at the Battle of White Mountain, outside Prague, prompted their flight into exile in the Dutch Republic, and continental Europe was plunged into the serial conflicts we call the Thirty Years War.From The Hague, Elizabeth spent more than two decades pursuing restitution of her ...”

“... to the shadowy, sooty margins: the focus is on the road in front. There is social variety to match William Frith, but none of his static staginess. Instead, we loom over the shoulder of a young woman, facing the stream; beggars, chatting couples of both sexes, women with children, a soldier signalling in bold red, walk towards us. A gent close to the kerb is ...”

“... paper that although one of her professors at Stanford had been Clinton’s defence secretary, William Perry, her ‘dream job’ was to be national security adviser. She knew Korean and was studying Mandarin: as a student she had published articles about North Korean counterfeiters and smuggling networks. So on paper she fitted in with all the other ...”

“... was nothing like the one he tarted up for his memoirs. Brussel’s real advice was to search White Plains, New York for an egomaniacal German high-school graduate in his forties with a facial scar; an expert in bomb-making; a man who had ‘a classic textbook case of paranoia’, rather than a genuine beef. Whoops. The evidence which led to the capture ...”

“... them to the crime. ‘There is, in short, no smoking gun,’ the former State Department official William Rogers wrote in a letter to Foreign Affairs objecting to a favourable review of Kornbluh’s book. Tanya Harmer, in Allende’s Chile and the Inter-American Cold War, wants to set aside arguments over who was at fault for any particular Cold War ...”

“... with the lefty technocrats, Johnson went with the utopian socialists too. It was in the spirit of William Morris, Barry Parker and Raymond Unwin that those family gaggles of Routemaster fans came out to bid the old version of the bus farewell, in the belief that efficiency and the bottom line aren’t enough, that the artefacts a city holds in common must be ...”

“... its windows; the crazy hole in the dancer’s torso to the left, through which a white-and-red-striped gobstopper whirls towards us like a bullet down a barrel – these are devices that none of us can follow. The power of mind here is chilling. Art historians race for the safety of iconography. Let me just speak (again with the present ...”

“... to think tanks. Leading the rightist rising were the conservative intellectuals in the orbit of William F. Buckley’s National Review and the zealous campus activists of Young Americans for Freedom (a group ultimately larger and far more influential than the much celebrated leftist Students for a Democratic Society), as well as members of the staunchly ...”

“... sand with a twig, poems with titles like ‘The Nameless Little Flower’ or ‘The Dream of the White Cloud’. Like John Clare, he found his poems in the fields and wrote them down. ‘I heard a mysterious sound in nature,’ he later said. ‘That sound became poetry in my life.’ He wrote that his ‘earliest experience of the nature of poetry’ was a ...”

“... literary editor who had made a name for himself rescuing the rejected (as one of their number, William Gass, put it). David ‘insisted’ that his wife should return to Vienna to face her past. Finally, she said, she was able to weep, ‘the whole week in Vienna, and all over the Austrian Alps’. Then it was time to go home to Riverside Drive.But further ...”

“... on his mind and took no notice. In any case, the Confessio does not criticise the regime. But ‘William Langland’, author of the satirical and apocalyptic masterpiece Piers Plowman, had to write it under a pseudonym. If his true identity had been known, he might easily have ended up in the Tower. The author of Richard the Redeless (‘Richard the ...”

“... could see that they were demolishing an old bridge. There were diggers pulling and hauling, men in white helmets climbing over steel girders, right in the shadow of a great steeple. The church was fancy, the steeple very high. I thought only television masts went as high as that. The four-arch bridge across the River Irvine was built by a certain Thomas Brown ...”

“... went to a trade-union dance with her friends from the Medical Institute. She wore a red dress and white slippers. She was asked to dance by an American – at first, she thought he might come from one of the Baltic countries – who called himself Alik. She liked him; he was very polite, sweet and reserved. He was well-dressed. She took him to meet her ...”