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“... Who cares who killed Roger Ackroyd?’ snapped Edmund Wilson, writing in the New Yorker in 1945. He refused to find out who did, because he’d already discovered that Agatha Christie’s books were garbage and that he couldn’t put them down. This is what you’d expect. Wilson was a literary prude, and detective stories are literature’s oldest profession ...”

“... closed canopies or those with small openings. Furthermore, Daniel Kelly has found that in Ireland young oaks in the open were worse affected by mildew than those under a canopy. Conversely, Rackham cites instances of regeneration in existing woods in the Middle Ages, but perhaps does not allow for the effect on the non-oak ‘underwood’ of coppicing for ...”

“... monk of St Albans. Any biographer is spoiled for choice among the sources: Robert of Gloucester, Roger of Wendover, Thomas Wykes of Osney, Alderman fitzThedmar of London – all of them salty and unrestrained in their comments, whether on the uselessness of Henry as a war leader or the brutality of Simon de Montfort’s massacre of the London Jews.At first ...”

“... according to his friend John Lehmann he was ‘a great, untidy, sprawling figure of a young man’. Virginia Woolf blamed his lack of looks on his father’s family: ‘He had a strong element of the Bell in him. What do I mean? I think I mean that he was practical & caustic & shrewd … He had much higher spirits. He was much more adapted to ...”

“... for international sanity’? Some subjects, like the Duke of Windsor, are let off lightly. Sir Roger Casement, executed for treason, was judged ‘honest and honourable’ by those who knew him, but the victim of ‘misguided extremism in time of war’. ‘Misguided’ is a useful word on these occasions. Nancy Mitford was ‘buried ... beside her ...”

“... some Victorian male-romances of the Haggard kind. They make Death of a Princess look like The Young Visiters.) But Haggard, who produced almost sixty romances and novels, wanted to be something more than a writer of page-turners. He wanted to serve his country in a high-minded volunteer way. ‘I believe that public service is my true line,’ he ...”

“... disastrous for both Henry’s reign and her own liberty. In 1173, Eleanor’s sons, Henry ‘the Young King’, Richard (later called Lionheart) and Geoffrey of Brittany, rebelled against their father, encouraged by Louis VII. Most chroniclers agree that Eleanor supported their revolt. Why she did so isn’t clear, but Henry was publicly unfaithful and the ...”

“... are present in the title of Amit Chaudhuri’s intelligent and funny new novel, which follows a young Bengali man and his uncle on their uneventful wanderings around London on a mid-1980s summer’s day. Homer and Joyce are clearly present, too, but Ananda isn’t impressed by Homer, ‘noting that the “rosy-fingered dawn” recurred without ...”

“... Congo linking Joseph Conrad (who improved his English by reading the Lowestoft newspapers) with Roger Casement (whom Conrad much admired for his integrity), Sebald remarks on the ‘distinctive ugliness’ of Belgium and the stunted growth of its inhabitants. On one visit to Brussels he encountered more hunchbacks and lunatics than he would normally come ...”

“... was irrelevant; all that mattered was content flow. Evan Spiegel, the impossibly rich, impossibly young-looking co-founder and CEO of Snap Inc. (formerly Snapchat) was there in person. He talked about augmented reality and what his company was doing for young people’s mental health with the air of being barely present ...”

“... Even so a self-portrait takes shape from this collage. Olivier was unwanted, ‘born to a young girl and a married man, taken in by an aunt who taunted her, and groped by a lascivious old uncle who made dominoes from old bones and, as she slept, kissed her breasts, pressed his hand over her mouth and tried to get into bed with her.’ ‘Fernande ...”

“... at the age of 38. She had been friendly or acquainted with other members of the group, including Roger Fry and Ottoline Morrell, but she never belonged to the inner circle of either Bloomsbury generation. Like her fellow painter and sometime lover Mark Gertler she worked ‘on the fringes of the Bloomsbury Group’, as the handout at Dora Carrington: Beyond ...”

“... middle-aged, rubber-gloved, white-coated man is shown carefully sticking a needle into a young naked girl, who turns away in an attitude of despair (she is actually part of an oil painting suffering from blisters). Over the girl’s belly, in red letters, we read ‘Foreword by Sir Ernst Gombrich’. ‘Mrs Walden,’ Gombrich remarks, ‘clearly ...”

“... of Apollinaire, Picasso, André Salmon and Max Jacob were drawn to Jarry, who lived fast, died young and left an unbeautiful corpse, more or less suicided by poverty and drink at 34 (the autopsy indicated tuberculous meningitis, but it was absinthe that did him in). This grim end only added to his posthumous allure. The Dadaists claimed him as a ...”

“... the argument, as if it is meant to be emphatic, but which by itself seems hardly worth saying. ‘Young people appear then to have been more promiscuous... than married adults.’ Even allowing for all kinds of cultural change, that seems always likely to have been (on average) true. So what is this book trying to tell us? That some things never ...”