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“... At all events, 24 pages of this self-imposed devoir were sent off each Tuesday to his friend John Johnston of Grange, a dullish youth of about Boswell’s own age, but one in whose affectionate and uncritical company he felt more at peace than with anyone. Fanny Burney, who commenced a journal at the age of 15, gave as her reason that ‘when the hour ...”

“... his children. During a period in England, he introduced them to the likes of Carlyle, Tennyson and John Stuart Mill. He expressed himself in a characteristically Jamesian way: ‘I will not attempt to state the year in which I was born, because it is not a fact embraced in my own knowledge, but content myself with saying instead, that the earliest event of my ...”

“... spreadsheet jigsaw, mapping the stories from the Sartre biographies (Annie Cohen-Solal, John Gerassi, Ronald Hayman) over those from the Beauvoir biographies (Deirdre Bair – very much the best; Claude Francis and Fernande Gontier, Margaret Crosland). Check those against the crucial four volumes of Beauvoir’s memoirs, those translated as The ...”

“... beyond his reach, went on the programme anyway and broke the taboo, which Mackay abandoned when he took up office in 1987. Pickles still seems unable to understand that it is not talking to the media but the stupid things he says to them that makes him notorious. With the exception nowadays of a few able solicitors, all judges are drawn from the relatively ...”

“... the Russells also gave Britain its last Whig prime minister, Conrad’s great-grandfather, Lord John Russell, later the first Earl Russell, who governed as a Whig from 1846 to 1852 and afterwards as a Liberal. If his own family history helped to bring into focus the indeterminacy of political commitments on the eve of the Civil War, it was his encyclopedic ...”

“... In the February election the voters returned an uncertain decision: Harold Wilson’s Labour Party took 301 seats on 11.7 million votes, Heath’s Tories got 297 seats on 11.9 million votes, and the Liberals led by Jeremy Thorpe found that their six million votes translated into 14 seats. The Liberals’ mini-revival suggested a solution to Heath’s ...”

“... Oxford to become a lawyer, and in 1932 he was called to the Bar. On the advice of a colleague he took elocution lessons to get rid of his Yorkshire accent, and soon he had a flourishing Chancery practice. There were occasional approaches from Oxford about returning to teach, but although he maintained an amateur interest in philosophy, he declined them. He ...”

“... John Carey has had access to voluminous archives stored in the Faber basement or in the keeping of William Golding’s family. No one else may see them; he alone can quote from unpublished novels, journals, memoirs, correspondence and conversations. He has made excellent use of these privileges, and the result is a full, friendly, and on proper occasions candid, account of a remarkable man, who took a long time to achieve an understanding of how truly remarkable he was, and then did so only fitfully ...”

“... a word first recorded in a court case of 1590. It was only at this point that ‘sanity’ took on its modern meaning: previously it had referred, like the French santé, to general health. In this limited sense it was the insane who defined the sane, not vice versa. During the 18th century mad-doctoring emerged as a medical specialism; by the late ...”

“... heavily on such Western travellers to Mecca as Ludovico de Varthema, Domingo Badia y Leblich, John Lewis Burckhardt and Richard Burton. While most Western reports pretended to be objective, in some cases this was a pretence only, and Peters would have been better advised to have treated Varthema’s 16th-century Itinerario as a novel about oriental ...”

“... he brought to both his collecting and his career as the chief architect of the oil industry, which took shape – and took off – in the first half of the 20th century. Gulbenkian was born in 1869 to a family of prosperous Armenian merchants living in Istanbul who were part of the amiras, a group of 165 mercantile families ...”

“... was signed, the comic novel remains unwritten but it will be, it will be. Instead, poor Carmen took delivery of my recently published ‘stern account of literary, publishing and theatrical folk’. I was given a surprise party at, inevitably, Soho’s Groucho Club. Among the sixty-odd faces present was one I didn’t recognise. ‘We haven’t met,’ the ...”

“... All her life, she seemed curiously fixed in childhood. In December 1957, Marianne met Lt Col John Kelly while working as an interpreter for the US Army, and they were married exactly a year later. On 25 May 1959, Petra’s half-sister was born and named Grace Patricia after the Princess of Monaco. Soon afterwards, ...”

“... well have learned the basics of the art from the recycled works of that universal publisher, Dr John Trusler (d. 1820): ‘Be not dark or mysterious; Affect not absence of mind; Punch no one in conversation; Hold no one by the button; Spit not on the carpet; Dare to be prudish; Avoid mauvaise honte.’ (‘What’s mauvaise honte, Mamma?’ – ‘Oh, ask ...”

“... its constantly repeated Dead March from Saul and Chopin’s Funeral March, each of which I took to my heart’: and the procession became ‘the most impressive part of the funeral’. I have no doubt that if Lord Harewood had grown up in a normal environment, he would, as a matter of course, have become a musician – whereas his musical ...”