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“... holds no surprises for the writer. ‘He sat there pale, pondering his own tale. I said, “Helena was still alive, eh?” ’ These old tricks of suspense are still there, but they take a gentler role, so that the more numinous qualities of what is narrated can be dwelt on. It is nice to know how we travel through the story – to see the automobile ...”

“... response: targeted assassinations simply provoke further retaliation (and Israel’s security wall is already proving incapable of deterring attacks). The horror it inspires cannot, however, be explained in terms of the deliberate targeting of civilians: according to McNamara, 100,000 people were burnt to death at the end of the war in the Allied attack ...”

“... River Arno. She is about the same age as Lucy Honeychurch and she even has the same duvet cover as Helena Bonham-Carter, who plays Lucy in the film – greater identifications have been built on less. At any rate she feels just as trapped, or rather more trapped, because (unlike Lucy) she is all too aware of what’s at stake. She has Lucy to help her ...”

“... comedies each feature one of the dramatist’s only three visibly pregnant women, Julietta and Helena (the third is Hermione in The Winter’s Tale). Even the unseen Mistress Elbow, in the hysterically funny non-account of events in the Bunch of Grapes, is said by Pompey Bum to be ‘with childe, and . . . great bellied, and longing (as I said) for ...”

“... a disappointment, just huge hunks of stone which could be gateposts from the end of any dry-stone wall, and I imagine that is where other similar tombstones have ended up. Much more interesting is the lychgate (restored c.1989): a single broad gate, attached by a bar and chain to an ancient pulley in the thickness of the ...”

“... some in a glass scenting the whole room, with its collection of keys hung on the plain plaster wall, the bleached oak, the Thirties paintings and bits of brocade. But as one came in, the last smell was always the fish that was put out in the vestibule for the cats. We settled on the royal retinue of Richard II 1388-99 as my research subject and there-after ...”

“... and she stared quietly back. A crowd of light: in A Midsummer Night’s Dream Lysander says that Helena engilds the night more ‘than all yon fiery oes and eyes of light’. Gillian Clarke’s phrase removes the gasping hyperbole and domesticates the particles. In ‘Sheep’s Skulls’ the sheep die On the open hill, and raven and buzzard Come like women ...”

“... not answer my calls. Finally he was found, seated gloomily by himself in the closet facing the wall. He was punishing himself. We later found a smallish puddle of vomit in the conservatory. No one had ever before punished him for his attacks of gastritis, naturally; it was all his own idea, his peculiar Bostonian sense of guilt. And what was Elizabeth ...”

“... shape before the novelist’s eyes, as a kind of hallucination; whether, when he looked at a wall, a tree or a face, he subsequently had absolute, or only partial, recall of it; and whether the musings and images that entered his head while dozing before a fire, or just before going to sleep, were comparable in nature or intensity to the novelist’s ...”

“... in portraits by Peter Hujar (whose photographs line the inside cover of Moser’s book like a wall of publicity stills), Diane Arbus, Richard Avedon, Robert Mapplethorpe, and, later, her partner Annie Leibovitz. Sontag’s post-cancer skunk-stripe hair made her instantly spottable. For those hitting the right places in Manhattan, Sontag sightings were as ...”

“... wild rebellious ambitious nature of mine. I wish I could satiate it with Empires, though a Saint Helena were the end.’ Her patriotic poems were published in the Nation, which was founded in 1842 and had become the publication which above all others ignited and inflamed Irish nationalism. In 1848, when Gavan Duffy, the editor of the Nation, was ...”

“... to be helping you write in secret. Why would I do that?’ ‘It might be good for fly on the wall,’ he said. ‘I’d like more fly on the wall in the book.’ He kept saying he’d done some work on the early draft but he couldn’t find it. That afternoon, as I laid out a second draft plan for the book, Julian ...”