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“... Shortly after the Sunday Times’s enforced move into the London Docklands, David Blundy and Jon Swain were strolling towards the new production plant’s heavily-guarded entrance. These two foreign correspondents are used to witnessing military activity (you may remember Swain as a character in Roland Joffe’s movie, The Killing Fields), but they were astonished to see an armoured car with a full complement of Royal Marines apparently patrolling inside the heavily-fortified perimeter fence ...”

“... for his money. By the mid-Forties he was chalking up three bottles of whisky a day, which as Sean French points out would be the financial equivalent of a modern-day cocaine habit. The roaring success of Gaslight helped to fund his addiction, so that the play made him and marred him at a stroke. A postcard to his brother from Ireland meticulously ...”

“... Rats From Casablanca’) was the city’s close brush with bubonic plague, when ‘an old French tramp, the Wyoming, in from Casablanca, where the black death has been intermittent for centuries’, falsely claimed to have carried out rat fumigation and was allowed to dock, first in Brooklyn, then in Lower Manhattan, then in Staten Island. Eventually ...”

“... Sean Wilsey’s father, Al, was orphaned as a teenager, dropped out of college, and made a fortune in dairy, real estate and other business ventures. Over fifty when Sean was born, Al flew a helicopter, charmed women and inspired in his son an apparently unquenchable desire for approval ...”

“... a big house in Hove while Bernard slept off hangovers in his London chambers, spent time with his French mistress and did a spot of writing. His first novel, The Light? (1898), ‘had to do with ancient Egypt, reincarnation and contemporary life’; Coronation (1902) ‘was distinguished by the most alliterative opening sentences I have ever ...”

“... When, in 1941, Sean O’Faolain wrote to the Irish Times to protest about the ‘miserable fees’ paid by Irish radio for talks by Irish writers, he inadvertently set in train the most nightmarishly savage satire in that paper’s history. O’Faolain’s letter, and the response to it from the impoverished rump that constituted the Irish intelligentsia, led to the foundation by him of WAAMA, the Writers Artists Actors Musicians Association, a short-lived trade union for workers whose services were not exactly regarded as essential ...”

“... out in time. Still there in Baghdad seems to be a peripatetic hand of stills photographers, mainly French, all slightly unhinged, veterans of Kabul and Romania and Northern Ireland, who revel in war zones. One of them came down to breakfast on the morning of 17 January and was bemused by the ashen sleepless faces around him. He had worn earplugs and slept ...”

“... suggests in his The Rise and Influence of Rationalism in Europe, quoting the learned 19th-century French scholar Alfred Maury, author of such abstruse books as Fées dans le Moyen Age and Histoire de la Magie. There is, however, one serious caveat attaching to every archaism. However slight such perdurables may be, however sweetened by the passage of time, it ...”

“... to project his own preoccupations with France, and with the democratic forces unleashed by the French Revolution. Vance explains how Americans in turn projected their own clashing outlooks on Europe. He makes the strongest possible case that of all European cities, Rome ought to be studied as a touchstone of American civilisation. Although practically ...”

“... incongruously, by enlightened secularism when Tone achieved a second identity as a soldier of the French Republic. None of this, obviously, had much to do with Irish social realities. In fact the élitist refinement of the United Irish Society insulated it from such realities. Marianne Elliott does not mince words in saying that it had ‘an instinctive fear ...”

“... called Catherine Beijdedvellen. Behar Senior then became a British citizen, having served in the French Foreign Legion and the British Army. On his death in 1936 – a bad period not only in England but throughout Europe – he left a widow and the young George in somewhat reduced circumstances. The change of name from Behar to Blake was understandable ...”

“... more disturbing, he had read in the press that the body waiting to go to Ireland was said by a French doctor to have been encased in a steel and leather surgical corset. The arrangements for Yeats’s reburial continued. On 20 August the Times reported that in two days’ time the corvette Macha would leave Cork for Dublin, and that ...”

“... for something to pass the hours over a long flight to Jakarta. ‘Eric Lustbader?’ suggested Sean, and I shook my head. I’d seen Michael Herr sending dispatches. The hours flew by. The Beach is studded with non-cinematic references to popular culture of the same Eighties vintage: Atari and Nintendo video games, Airfix models, Tintin and Asterix, David ...”

“... of the Deutschland’ was almost certainly not uttered by Sister Henrica Fassbaender. But in fact Sean Street’s book The Wreck of the Deutschland, which makes much of this incident, is engrossing from start to finish. It has the further appeal of sounding sympathetic. The author’s motivation throughout the fifteen years he devoted to assembling and ...”