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“... sacred and secular power, lies the whole meaning of the Abbey. It is also the subject matter of Paul Binski’s subtle, learned and absorbing book. The origins of the Abbey – to be precise, the Collegiate Church of St Peter in Westminster – are shrouded in uncertainty. A Saxon foundation on Thorney Island, the one dry spot in the fenland that once ...”

“... whereas Foppington has to be blissfully innocent of any shadow of self-criticism. The novelist Paul Bailey has produced a biography of three ‘Queer Lives’; that is to say, lives of the ‘queer’ or (as they have later come to be called) the ‘gay’.* The subject of the last of his studies is Arthur Marshall, famous as the reviewer of ...”

“... room in Whalley Range’, about iron bridges and ‘a river the colour of lead’. In May 1983, Paul Slattery – who had photographed Joy Division in 1979, too, beside an industrial estate in Stockport – took some shots for Sounds of The Smiths standing in the ruins of Central Station, once the pride of the Midland Railway Company but by then a rackety ...”

“... never enjoyed a good press (although Joyce, oddly, claimed to like it). As hardened a traveller as Paul Theroux emerged wild-eyed and spluttering: ‘I knew at once that Belfast was an awful city ... demented and sick ... a hated city ... one of the nastiest cities in the world ... the old horror ... a city of drunks, of lurkers, of late-risers ... the ...”

“... how often the subject of a modern short story is likely to be humiliation, embarrassment, defeat. Paul Theroux’s latest collection isn’t of that kind, although the gloomy title story that opens it bodes ill. It tells, from the husband’s point of view, the tale of a failing marriage, and concludes: ‘Too late, too far, too dark, he thought; and he knew ...”

“... as something disgusting – and pushed it with his foot in passing, without thinking that there lay the ungrateful son of a tender father. * ‘L’Ingratitude’ turned up in the course of my research for a biography of Constantin Heger, who taught Emily and Charlotte Brontë French during their time in Brussels and with whom Charlotte fell in love. I’d ...”

“... beyond the land’, to borrow the words the author himself used of his alter ego Darl in As I lay dying. As Faulkner’s creative powers declined so his reputation grew, aided by his en-Nobelment in 1950. By the time of his death in 1962 he was generally acknowledged to be the greatest American novelist of the 20th century, a judgment which now, with only ...”

“... up from the Piraeus under the outer side of the northern wall, becoming aware of dead bodies that lay at the place of execution at the same time felt a desire to see them and a repugnance and aversion, and that for a time he resisted and veiled his head, but overpowered despite all by his desire, with wide staring eyes he rushed up to the corpses and ...”

“... cultural revolution. In Sartre’s apprentice years, analysing the authors he admired, all of whom lay outside the academic pantheon, was no doubt a (somewhat academic) way of identifying and assimilating the techniques that defined the ‘professional’ avant-garde writer who then integrated the innovations of Joyce, Kafka and Faulkner into a literary form ...”

“... style always ‘come a cropper’). Hensher, too, at ‘inexplicable moments’, has had to ‘lay down Down with Skool! and cry with laughter’, and he first read it when he was ‘probably no more than ten or eleven’. So I suppose I ought to say at this point that I didn’t read it when I was at school, and reading it now I don’t find it ...”

“... Mademoiselle de Lespinasse – Voltaire – Madame Helvétius ... We take leave of Gibbon as he ‘lay back among the pillows, dozed, half-woke, dozed again, and became unconscious – for ever’. With Hume, the ‘wonderful equanimity lasted till the very end’, or at any rate the end of the paragraph. By this reckoning, Freeman, who ‘went pop in ...”

“... to keep Wales at bay and to counter her husband’s evangelical and downward move, as a lay preacher who had swerved from his Anglican origins. But both parents were high-minded, and questions of ritual remained alive, as they would for Jones throughout his life, in a household whose aspirations were framed by a lower middle-class artisanal culture ...”

“... Wilde, a passionate vindication of Noam Chomsky (‘among the few Americans of his generation to lay claim to the title of original thinker’) and a long, thoughtful portrait of Professor Shahak, the great Israeli human rights activist. There is a strikingly good article on Paul Scott’s The Raj Quartet in which Hitchens ...”

“... had edited Panorama with a sure hand ... And when Peacock left there was the burly figure of Paul Fox ready to step into his shoes as Controller of BBC 1 ...’ Lumpen-paragraphs sit upon each other gracelessly, heavy with dull and often clumsily conveyed management detail. Michael Swann is a ‘man with a highly distinguished scientific background, a ...”

“... of other tutus in the first impression are subsumed into the foliate green of the backcloth. Paul Valéry wrote in 1935 that Degas’s ‘passion was to reconstruct the body of the female animal as the specialised slave of the dance, the laundry … or the streets’; the woman as ‘specialised slave’ of her repeated movements. For the dancer trained ...”