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“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... a dying schoolfriend after people became disturbed by how long she had stood transfixed by Sophia Holland’s half-closed eyes. The moment has an echo in some lines from 1863:I’ve seen a Dying EyeRun round and round a Room –In search of Something – as it seemed –Then Cloudier become –And then – obscure with Fog –And then – be soldered ...”

“... of secret pictures of her in bizarre poses and costumes, and the Stieglitz associate F. ‘Fred’ Holland Day, whose semi-nude impersonation of Jesus Christ on the Cross – at once gauzy, grisly and homoerotic – provoked a scandal when he exhibited the photographs in 1898. The most prominent practitioner of the style in recent years has been the ...”

“... gas.The next day we zipped south on a motorway, Moby on the CD player, huge container trucks from Holland and Germany careening by in the rain. Coffee in Albert, a quick gander in the drizzle at the French war memorial in the town square, then on to the giant Lutyens monument to the Missing of the Somme at Thiepval. It was mid-morning, and we were the only ...”