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“... 1974, when IRA bombs were going off all over the place. In the dock was this tiny, strange, silent young woman. The case against her consisted of a string of unequivocal confessions to the bombings at Manchester, Latimer and Euston. None of the confessions was denied – how could they be? Some of the most damning of them had been written in the defendant’s ...”

“... scenes, the poet’s baffled, half-articulate encounter with someone very old or very young, beyond speech, or unready for it, Jonathan Wordsworth emphasises, not that such meetings are occasions for dialogue, but that they are occasions for meditation. He makes the poet-narrator of far more interest to the reader than his interlocutor. Sometimes ...”

“... la France’. Close to it very often stands Joan of Arc, in armour, sword in hand, as if pointing young men to the battlefield, to die for France, or whatever France has fought its wars for. It was tragically appropriate that she was canonised in 1920, just after a million men had died for France; she was wafted up to Heaven on a gale of high explosive and ...”

“... of the night and wake us all up with bottles of wine. I think it was 1931 when Henry met another young expat writer by the name of Alfred Perles. Alfred was mowing the lawn at the American Golf and Country Club, and the expat members were putting out this horrible and pretentious literary magazine called the Booster. So Alfred told the club that he was a ...”

“... of One for My Baby is called Alfie (Parsons seems to be paying homage to characters played by Michael Caine). Alfie’s wife is called Rose. Rose dies on him. She was working in Hong Kong. In Man and Boy Harry’s misfortune led him to reassess his relationship with his young son and his parents and to fall in love with ...”

“... for the patria’ – the words inscribed on monuments to the Nationalist war dead, as recorded in Michael Richards’s excellent monograph After the Civil War.* The defeated Republican half of Spain was commonly referred to in the press as ‘the Red horde’. Hundreds of thousands of them were killed by Nationalist paramilitaries in a largely planned attempt ...”

“... that the song means a great deal to his wife, Gretta, and longer still the essential truth, that Michael Furey, her dead first love, used to sing it to her. These layers of Gabriel’s unknowing are hardly different from our own (‘What about the song? Why does that make you cry?’ ‘And who was the person long ago?’), and at the end of the story, when ...”

“... distracted. Frail elderly people often have a less robust systemic response to infection than the young and fit, but even so, Mr Wedderburn was flushed with a temperature of 38°C, and was breathing much too quickly. As I listened to his lungs with my stethoscope his fingers picked at the bedcovers, and his feet knocked against his cot-bars. When I took a ...”

“... Antonine Rome, since the Gonzagas let him make off with a clutch of antique busts that includes a young Marcus Aurelius. The imperial prince is portrayed staring wistfully away from us into the philosophic beyond: an image of governance as a sedative to the governed that saps their contentious energies, leaving them mild and calm. But the grand, dimly lit ...”

“... insisted that ‘a date must soon be fixed beyond which no further immigration can be allowed. The young immigrants who have just come here will have to return to their homelands and their families.’ Racism seemed to be gaining a presence not just in politics but in pop culture too. That same month, May 1976, David Bowie was photographed at Victoria Station ...”

“... Berwickshire in August 1914, during which someone reads aloud from A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, then appearing in the Egoist, and war is declared. It describes two successive changings of the literary guard: from the Great Victorians to the Great Moderns (Hardy, James, Conrad, Kipling, Wells), and from the Great Moderns to really modern Modernism ...”

“... Gide who turned critical of the Soviet Union, bitterly disappointing their hosts, were excoriated.Michael David-Fox’s Showcasing the Great Experiment is the story of Soviet wooing of the Western intelligentsia, focusing on VOKS under Kameneva and Arosev. About a hundred thousand foreigners visited the Soviet Union in the prewar period, many of them ...”

“... non-SF novel, The Hospital of the Transfiguration, written in the late 1940s and depicting a young doctor’s wartime internship in a psychiatric hospital, was translated in 1988. But his earliest SF novels, Man from Mars and The Astronauts, weren’t. Lem dismissed them as mutilated by a subservience to Soviet ideology. So his career in English begins ...”

“... a necklace, the Heart of the Ocean, that went down with the ship but found instead a sketch of a young woman wearing it. She contacts the expedition’s leader and tells him that she is that woman. Today for between $549.99 and $799.99 (on eBay) you can buy a reproduction of the fictional necklace made soon after the film came out; or you can buy a ...”

“... civilised, increasingly mid-Atlantic, Thirties drawl was hard to hear above the din of the Angry Young Men in London and the Wild Men of New York (novelists who stabbed their wives in the stomach). As a screenwriter, Isherwood has credits on The Great Sinner (a Dostoevsky biopic), a vehicle for Shirley Temple, and a treatment of Carson McCullers’s ...”