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“... of burial, and the tour de force is also a sober labour of love. This Waugh has affiliations with Richard Boston’s Osbert Lancaster, the portrait of a connoisseur of social oddity who also loved it steadily and whole. Boston is discriminatingly informative about Lancaster’s achievement as artist and cartoonist, and ...”

“... politely inquired: ‘Do you wish to pass me on the left or on the right?’ The incident, which Richard Boston recounts in his biographical memoir of Lancaster, captures something essential about a man who, as a cartoonist and writer excelled in capturing types, human and architectural, yet himself remained hard to typify. Georgian (Town) Pillar ...”

“... On 5 December 1963, the day Jack Ruby shot Lee Harvey Oswald in Dallas, a man in Boston named Arthur Inman, having made several earlier attempts on his own life, managed to put a bullet through his head. A variety of chronic ailments and complaints had made him an invalid for nearly all of his 68 years, and except for brief excursions in his ancient chauffeur-driven Cadillac, he had since 1919 confined himself to an apartment building in downtown Boston named Garrison Hall ...”

“... a bold choice for a hydrophobe, but Pam Waters lived for years next to the tidal River Witham in Boston, Lincolnshire, without it intruding on her life. She wasn’t tall enough to see over the grassy dyke at the bottom of her garden to the river on the other side, but since she hated water that was fine. Sometimes a fishing boat chugged by at high tide and ...”

“... New World, where there was known to be land for the taking. Pynchon settled seven miles south of Boston, near Dorchester, but subsequently moved and became the leading citizen of the newly founded town of Roxbury, between Dorchester and Boston. He served as treasurer of the Massachusetts Bay Company and traded directly ...”

“... father had been brought low by the intrigues of his enemies did the family emigrate to Boston. There, Gibran grew up to become a major artistic and political figure. In Paris he knew Debussy, while Rodin went so far as to acclaim him as ‘the Blake of the 20th century’. As it happened, Gibran could remember not only his previous reincarnation as ...”

“... six feet, impulsive and urban’. Not so stimulating, if we’re to take Updike’s word, were Richard Maple and many of his cousins. With Mary and the four Updike children as his most generous sources, Begley is able to trace the degree of autobiography present in Updike’s fiction. It’s in many places very high. When Mary and John separated after two ...”

“... not written into any contract: self-respect, stability, social standing. Work is ‘a road’, as Richard Sennett once wrote, ‘to the unification of the self’. Except that it doesn’t usually end up like that, which is the reason the next page of the Guardian has Jeremy Bullmore, a sage and doleful-looking ‘agony uncle’, fielding people’s problems ...”

“... from what is now the Czech Republic, and whose grandson, John Kerry, returned to his native Boston this week to accept the Democratic nomination for president. Frederick Kerry made and lost three fortunes in America, but losing the last one had left him without a name: consequently, around lunchtime on 23 November 1921, he walked into the men’s room ...”

“... Road, no British Library or Bibliothèque nationale de France. It lacked the quaint bookshops of Boston, where the staff seemed to know not only the books they sold but their 18th and 19th-century authors, not to mention Harvard’s Widener Library. But it was still a city of books, collectors and readers. Every good secondhand bookshop offered guidance for ...”

“... are rare. Mayor discusses a black and ochre painted vase in the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, which shows Herakles and Hesione confronting the Monster of Troy. The hero is shooting off a flight of arrows in the direction of a monster whose toothy visage seems to emerge from a cliff or pillar. It resembles a large fossil skull, and it’s hard to ...”

“... it is secretly abandoned. In the midst of all the appearances of fidelity to the way it was in Boston and Harlem (and Lansing, Michigan, where Malcolm grew up, where the Klan hounded his family, where his father was killed), the film shifts us into dream time, its only location is a movie world. It bears the same sort of relation to the history of civil ...”

“... and chose infectious diseases as the easiest route to achieve his goal. He and Rajani moved to Boston, where the élite of US medicine fight among themselves for huge reputations and lucrative private practice. They endured a roach-infested apartment for a while but his ambitions waned in the face of slow and laborious laboratory research and he accepted ...”

“... and that ‘almost every character is real’ – his sole invention being their pursuer, Richard Nayler, mockingly saluted by James, duke of York, as ‘our regicide-hunter-in-chief’.The New England experiences of Whalley and Goffe are not unknown to historians; Christopher Pagliuco’s The Great Escape of Edward Whalley and William Goffe ...”

“... already the author of his major works. The Foundation nonetheless took a big punt on the genius of Richard Powers, who was awarded his MacArthur in 1989, aged only 32. I haven’t checked, but he is probably the youngest novelist ever to win a fellowship. Generally unknown in 1989, and temperamentally reticent, he has lately divulged something of his personal ...”