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“... deeply embarrassing letter telling him how much I admired him’. The letter was intended to be read ‘in the event of my pre-decease’. Even as Bron penned it, though, Evelyn was telling Diana Cooper that he had no plans to fly out to his stricken son – unless the boy died, of course, in which event he might feel obliged to put in an appearance. The ...”

“... thought they might well be viewed as links between mammals, birds and reptiles. His bête noire, Richard Owen, held fast to Platonisin, however, and denied that they were intermediate to anything – he placed the platypus with the edentates (armadillos, again). Owen even denied that Ornithorychus laid eggs, though British settlers and Aborigines said they ...”

“... as your husband fucks another woman. Enright’s short stories are some of the most furious I’ve read. On nearly every page, there is rage. The title story in The Portable Virgin (1991) ends with the memorable line: ‘I’ve nowhere else to go. I love that man.’ Her female characters are restless, tormented, unhappy in their domestic roles, searching for ...”

“... baby brother, Joshua. At Parsons’s trial, conducted by Governor Endecott, the charge sheet was read again. Confronted with his wife’s allegations, Parsons defended his apparent lack of sorrow at the loss of their children, explaining that he had gone to weep in the fields, so that he wouldn’t seem unmanly or further distress his wife. Asked why she ...”

“... say, the book of the Talmud in heaven. If it is the same kind of book as the others we typically read every day, is it at any rate compiled from the skins of rams, goats or calves, or from papyrus or the rushes of oriental swamps, or from old strips of rags, or from some perhaps even more common material? In the later 13th century, Italian craftsmen in ...”

“... and hollows’ below. He admired the scene, though not excessively. The naturalists he had read had described ‘submarine grottos decked with a thousand beauties’. This was, he thought, ‘rather exuberant language’. The marine biologist Juli Berwald was more impressed. She describes her first encounter with a coral reef as ‘love at first ...”

“... there is no debate and no vote. This leads to administrative absurdities of the kind revealed in Richard Crossman’s diary entry for 20 September 1966, when he was Lord President: ‘The Privy Council is the best example of pure mumbo-jumbo you can find. It is interesting to reflect that four ministers, busy men, all had to take a night and a day off to go ...”

“... for a past homeland experienced at a distance and in conditions of relative ease. More often we read of poverty, distrust, conflict, self-doubt and legal insecurity, not only before and during World War Two but after it, in the new forms of persecution called up by the Cold War. This book is ungainly. It does not promise or perform completion ...”

“... of Enlightenment, anglicisation and politeness throughout the English-speaking world, not only read, but spawning imitations, from the Edinburgh of the Easy Club to Massachusetts, where a group of Harvard students began a weekly periodical, the Telltale, in 1721. The erudite Porter also knows a more nuanced version of his story, having as he does an ...”

“... forums with a couple of dozen other stalwarts to listen to them – the likes of Séamus Healy, Richard Boyd Barrett and Thomas Pringle, all now catapulted into the Dáil with a mandate to disturb the political peace. While the Fianna Fáil aristocracy were punching their cards at local meetings and stealthily ascending the party ladder, these newcomers ...”

“... a quick look at the new find and declared: ‘No great poet has appeared.’ At Cambridge, Sir Richard Jebb thought that while Bacchylides was no eagle, he ought to be praised as a lively nightingale. ‘Students,’ he added, ‘would find his poetry helpful in facilitating their approach to Pindar.’ Bacchylides had been compared with Pindar from the ...”

“... in a frontal lobe of the brain. Atran attends more seriously to the idea of memes started by Richard Dawkins; started like a hare, perhaps, but still enjoying a fashion, if no longer in Dawkins’s hands (or even with his blessing). Atran thinks there are things going for the notion, and that it may find a place in the theory of cognition. But it ...”

“... but he also knew that the real story was in Pakistan. He decided to investigate the links between Richard Reid, the shoe-bomber who mercifully lost his nerve, and Islamist groups in Pakistan. This was what Musharraf thought ‘too intrusive’. Pakistani officials more than once told Mariane that if he had behaved like other foreign journalists, the tragedy ...”

“... work on a screen version of his novel La Vie des Abeilles. When the script was translated Goldwyn read it with increasing consternation until he could no longer deny the evidence of his senses. ‘My God!’ he cried. ‘The hero is a bee!’ As Ian Hamilton tells it in Writers in Hollywood, Maeterlinck was sent packing, despite his attempt to improve his ...”

“... that one day, some inconsequential trigger might provoke a breakdown, the way her colleague Richard Shepherd, who worked to identify bodies after the Bali bombings, described in his book Unnatural Causes (2018) being undone by the sound of ice cubes cracking in a glass.Recently Black disclosed her own rape, when she was nine years old, by a transient ...”