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“... following the brief Younger Dryas glaciation, had shut down the Gulf Stream for two millennia. Robert Corell, chair of the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment, scorned the prediction of a sea-level rise of up to 0.59 metres; the figure now looked like a metre at the very least, and he showed a map of what that rise would do to Egypt, the Caspian shores and ...”

“... stayed in an apartment overlooking the beach. ‘It is such a wonderful apartment,’ she wrote to Robert Lowell in 1958, that we’ll never rent it again, no matter what heights rents soar to, I think. Top floor, 11th, a terrace around two sides, overlooking all that famous bay and beach. Ships go by all the time, like targets in a shooting gallery, people ...”

“... her novels about Cyril (who for some unaccountable reason Spufford thinks is called Hugh), Anthea, Robert and Jane and their magical adventures. The first is Five Children and It (1902) – the fifth child being their baby brother; ‘It’ being the Psammead, or sand fairy, a creature that looks a bit like a monkey with eyes on stalks, can grant a wish a day ...”

“... the Conservative or Labour Parties. There is no over-publicised Alliance bandwagon, as in the winter of 1981-2, but there is a new solidity and stability to the support which it can now mobilise. The obvious conclusion is that the Alliance is here to stay, because it fills a vacuum, and that vacuum is left by the effective demise of the Labour Party. The ...”

“... served her apprenticeship in old-time Music Hall, in the traditional routine of summer season and winter pantomime. Theatre managers got value for their money when they booked Beryl. She could sing and dance and slapstick, all at the same time. When war broke out, she was requisitioned by ENSA, later returning to her earlier pursuits and sharing in the golden ...”

“... and especially little by comparison with the achievements of German philologists such as Ernst Robert Curtius. English Classicists are inclined to regard anything later than Silver Age Latin as beneath their notice, thus perpetuating the prejudices of Renaissance scholars (who could at least claim to have read some of the works they rejected). British ...”

“... There is, of course, a long tradition of eccentric locales in the history of detective fiction. Robert van Gulik wrote a series set in ancient imperial China; Agatha Christie’s Death Comes as the End is set in the Egypt of the pharaohs. However, these settings were clearly exceptions; and part of their appeal was their distance from paradigmatic locations ...”

“... jobs disappearing, Park City reinvented itself as a ski resort, and built slopes, spas and hotels. Robert Redford’s Sundance Institute is about twenty miles away: in 1981 he took over a small Utah film festival and turned it into the most important film festival in the US. Of course, Redford himself isn’t here this year: he’s filming in Prague. Apart ...”

“... swooping through the dark and coming up over a hill. Beautifully shot, as the whole movie is, by Robert Richardson, a welcome Oscar nominee. Then the riders pause. In spite of the apparent evidence of the previous shots, they can’t see. There is something wrong with the placing of the eyeholes in their hoods. They tear at the hoods, curse and quarrel, and ...”

“... The biggest file on display belongs to Ernest Hemingway, who worked for the FBI in Cuba over the winter of 1942-43. It was a marriage arranged by the US ambassador, Spruille Braden, and not a happy one. In exchange for uncovering Falangists and Germans Hemingway procured an allocation of gasoline, firearms, depth charges and a budget of $500 to $1000 a month ...”

“... presiding presence; his poetry is the bar before which other poets –Auden and Eliot, Hardy and Robert Lowell and Browning. Pound and, yes, Hill – are brought to judgment. This is not overt. Robinson can’t, any more than the rest of us, come on like a latter-day Leavis, a fearlessly normative critic; instead, psychologists and moral philosophers are ...”

“... the 1890s as newspaper sketch-artists in Philadelphia. Drawn together by the magnetic preaching of Robert Henri, a slightly older painter who had returned from art school in Paris to his native Philadelphia feverish with the spirit of Left Bank aesthetic revolt, they coalesced into a dissident brotherhood dedicated to an art which championed the contemporary ...”

“... By the time Friedrich Engels arrived in England in the winter of 1842, the country already had a class warrior of its own. One of Engels’s new neighbours in downtown Manchester had spent the summer warning his countrymen of imminent social catastrophe. ‘It is my firm belief,’ Richard Cobden told the House of Commons in July, ‘that within six months we shall have populous districts in the north in a state of social dissolution ...”

“... when he delivered rousing speeches at the mass demonstrations on Spa Fields in Islington in the winter of 1816-17. The involvement of a republican group, the Spenceans, and the rioting that followed the meeting on 2 December dissuaded moderate reformers in Parliament such as Sir Francis Burdett from supporting the popular agitation. To his credit, Hunt ...”

“... new book has just turned out to be entirely plagiarised from translations of American poets called Robert – Creeley, Mezey, Bly, Lowell, Penn Warren etc. The perpetrator had sent a copy of the book to one of the translators whose work he had stolen, eliciting the response: ‘Purely original’. Then the translator reads the book and finds his own ...”