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“... and said had just been born (Prince Octavius had died five years earlier at the age of four). When George realised what day it was and that he had been kept in his straitjacket and not allowed to go to church, he suddenly went under the sofa, saying that he would converse with his saviour there, and that no one was to interrupt them. He also claimed that he ...”

“... Here at last it is, seven years after Urry’s death, edited from drafts by his former colleague Andrew Butcher. The text runs to less than a hundred pages, but there are ample appendices and source-notes, and anyway these hundred pages of dense documentary detail are worth a thousand of theorising. Our historical knowledge of Elizabethan writers like ...”

“... from Belfast. His father, Hugh O’Hagan, trained as an iron-worker and lived on the road where St Mary’s Chapel stood, Abercrombie Street, number 112. Hugh died of bronchitis at his work in 1932: he’d been working as a night watchman with the Statute Labour Department in Govan. All his sons went to Borstal, and graduated to Barlinnie prison, though ...”

“... he uses, as here, in his short poem (a free version of the Latin poem by Arthur Johnston) about St Andrew’s, where he has lived with his family and worked for more than twenty years: I love how it comes right out of the blue North Sea edge, sunstruck with oystercatchers. A bullseye centred at the outer reaches, A haar of kirks, one inch in front of ...”

“... Last year a group of American climbers on Everest discovered the body of George Mallory, the British mountaineer who died on the mountain in 1924, close to the summit, which he and his companion, Andrew Irvine, may or may not have reached. Since then there has been an unseemly rush to cash in on the discovery with at least six books, a poor film made by the BBC, several websites and the syndication of photographic rights across the globe ...”

“... his clientèle by developing, designing and managing a warehouse in Dunlop Street with his brother George. Although this particular venture never made any money, Thomson kept his hand in at the speculator’s game. He had a financial interest in several of his best known designs, usually sharing the risk with partners in the building trades. The contributors ...”

“... Brian Epstein had taken the Beatles over to America, and the Beatles had taken over America. In St Petersburg, on the other hand, youth culture has been left alone to flourish only for the last year or two. A venue-owner in the city recently told me that he has nearly three hundred local bands lined-up to play over the next four months. But this enthusiasm ...”

“... Andrew Motion’s book is intended to portray a family’s rich self-destructiveness. He begins with Larkin’s famous quatrain: Man hands on misery to man.   It deepens like a coastal shelf. Get out as early as you can,   And don’t have any kids yourself. The Lamberts – painter George (1873-1930), composer-conductor Constant (1905-51), and manager of The Who, Kit (1935-81) – got out as early as they could, and of the two who had kids neither showed paternal enthusiasm or skill ...”

“... takes its title from an obscure event that occurred on 16 November 1776. An American ship, the Andrew Doria sailing out of Maryland, put into the Dutch Caribbean port of St Eustatius. The vessel flew the flag of the Continental Congress, and instead of being turned away as the British had demanded – ...”

“... but, after all, sudden conversions occur. ‘Personally, I would have had the watchers out on St Paul for a long time if I had been in charge of the Christian secret service when he came blundering into Damascus yelling that he’d gone blind, and Christ was the Messiah.’ Railton does his work only too well and on the last page we see one of his younger ...”

“... boys were grown up, he got lonely; simple as that.’ At other times P.G. Wodehouse takes over. George Mitchell is ‘an immensely shrewd and capable wise oldish bird’; Bill Clinton was ‘a total brick throughout’; Derry Irvine ‘has a brain the size of a melon’. People are ‘of that ilk’ and can be found with ‘their faces grimacing as if a ...”

“... for a career. As a dispenser of life’s prizes William hardly compared with his elder brother George, who was chairman of the East India Company and a Member of Parliament for the City of London, and who could steer a man towards a governorship of a province worth as much as many a bishopric. Lyall’s clients seem not to have entered holy orders from any ...”

“... sympathetic, of the disciples. We recognise him as someone not unlike ourselves. A statue of St Thomas at the Palayur Jetty, Kerala. But there is another part of Thomas’s story which is less familiar to the West, and which would certainly have loomed large in Jacob of Sarugh’s conception of him: his mission (or missions) to India. That he came is ...”

“... at all between knowing you want to pee and then just peeing. I was at Plimpton’s funeral in St John the Divine not long ago, and they sat me near the front, you know. Suddenly, I had to go. I knew I wasn’t gonna make it all the way down the aisle so I spotted a little side door and I got the canes and nipped in there. Halfway down the corridor, I was ...”

“... of reconciliation with his friends. Newspapers are ‘they’ and we, after all, are ‘we’. As Andrew Boyle relates, it turned out that a great many old acquaintances of Burgess and Maclean were much more horrified – felt, indeed, much more betrayed – by the fact that the late Goronwy Rees gave a version of their flight to the People than by the flight ...”