“... Brotherhood of Ventriloquists, recruiting hundreds of disciples from Cuba, Guatemala, Holland, Ireland and India as well as Britain, Canada and the US. Their international organ was known as the Oracle, and several of them solemnised their vocation by calling themselves ‘doctor’ or ‘professor’. When Berger died, his Kentucky home became a ...”

“... congregation look sober and worthy, Gay Pride not much in evidence with the wreath laid by Thelma Holland, Wilde’s daughter-in-law, a link which vaults the century. After the congregation clears we do cutaway shots of the window, ‘the little patch of blue’, and that’s the end of our filming in the Abbey which has been going on, on and off, since last ...”

“... the Great War, he serves in the intelligence corps; in civilian life he owns a large house in Holland Park and an Old Rectory in Berkshire. The 18th-century canvases on his own walls are valuable canine portraits by George Stubbs. Clifford Smith dates the new acquisition to around 1735 and explains to the world that it is clearly a mockery of ‘poor ...”

“... his readers’ presuppositions make them make him. Yet inside its opacity (exactly as with Henry James) is an unforced emotional directness which it seems a kind of insult not to take straight, as simple truth. On these terms it is hard to understand what this poem is about unless it is written by a poet bitterly angered by having his verse ...”

“... an ‘atomic bomb’. In the book a few black spheres two feet in diameter destroy the dykes of Holland and lay waste to Paris, Berlin, Tokyo, Moscow, Chicago and much of London. In 1924, Churchill wrote a gloomy essay in Pall Mall speculating whether a new kind of bomb ‘no bigger than an orange’ would be able to ‘concentrate the force of a thousand ...”

“... people’s successes, on occasion tempted to annex them – 15th-century Italy or 17th-century Holland – by force of arms, in vain forays to offset the peasant stillness at home.This is a memorable description. But what were the causes of the web of inertias that made up this French identity? Braudel has rather little to say about them. The luxuriant ...”

“... Having watched him appear as a shy and uncomfortable man in a television interview with Mary Holland, I was surprised when I went to Galway, where he was speaking to a university audience, to see that he was confident and funny on stage. He read amusing bits from books that I had thought, up to then, were drooping with melancholy. Soon afterwards, I went ...”

“... of four who lived in the area, was spending the evening with Deborah Lamprell, who worked at Holland Park Opera. Yasin El Wahabi went to the mosque to say the prayer that would close his fast. His sister Nur Huda was revising. She was at Holland Park School and had been commended by her teachers recently for a ...”

“... has remained home to some of the African Americans who left it.My cousin Gunther emigrated to Holland with his mother, my father’s oldest sister, after Hitler came to power. In the summer of 1943, when he was 22 and she was 44, they were caught up in one of a series of raids on Amsterdam’s Jewish areas. Gunther, wearing a leather bomber jacket of the ...”

“... He acted in Monte Hellman’s terrific film Two-Lane Blacktop (1971), playing the Mechanic to James Taylor’s Driver. Brian is the Wilson most often thought ‘childlike’, but this was just as true of Dennis. He made impossible demands on everyone around him, knowing that he would always be indulged and forgiven. ‘Dennis had to keep moving all the ...”

“... imprisoned and that I’m anxious not to be thought personally responsible for that. 26 April. To Holland for the Vermeer exhibition. Travel to Delft separately from the rest of the group, who make up a coach party. R. hopes that this expedition, which includes prominent bankers, lawyers and industrialists, all benefactors of the National Gallery, will ...”

“... subsequently visited her in hospital. The family continued to take foreign holidays, in Denmark, Holland and Prague, and Fritz’s parents went to the United States to explore the possibilities for emigration. The Sterns started to think about leaving in 1935; in 1938, six weeks before Kristallnacht, they sailed for New York. Two things stand out from ...”

“... copies in Britain in its first six months. ‘There is something almost impertinent,’ Henry James wrote, ‘in the way … Mr Stevenson achieves his best effects without the aid of the ladies.’ Was it, he asked, ‘a work of high philosophic intention, or simply the most ingenious and irresponsible of fictions’? In his ‘Decay of ...”

“... Crockatt and Powell on Lower Marsh, a street opposite The Cut near the Old Vic, where I buy Henry James’s ‘The Lesson of the Master’. It’s a short story in which Henry St George, a famous novelist, supposedly Daudet but resembling James himself, gives the benefit of his experience to a young writer, Paul Overt. St ...”

“... death finished off his father. He had punished the wrong son. The institution in which the young James Carew O’Gorman Anderson took up his post in 1914 had been in existence for nearly fifty years. By then it had no parallel anywhere in the world. Its origins lay in the crisis of the Ch’ing Empire in the mid-19th century, when the Taiping Rebellion gave ...”