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“... and even managed to gain the disapproval of his old primary school teacher who, according to Stephen Gilbert, admired his final interview but was not pleased when ‘he said “God the old bugger” ... I didn’t like that.’ It was such a successful finale that I still expect the credits to roll and Potter to pop up again to instruct us not to assume ...”

“... jaunty impressionistic book takes us into the Sixties, with an account of his experiences as a young journalist writing, sporadically, for the Guardian, while, in the intervals, getting caught up in all kinds of adventures (best of all an improbable encounter, in the company of Samuel Beckett, with Peter O’Toole). This post-war Paris is largely made up ...”

“... innocence of childhood; and have great mountain tumults and sonorities in adolescence and young manhood; and afterwards there are the slow fertile turnings of maturity, when the river becomes ever deeper and wider; until at last it empties itself into the bitter immensity of death, the ocean of the end? And by an extension of the metaphor, the river ...”

“... garden of Ruth’s childhood home. It is a huge, dilapidated structure, in whose sinister pit the young child was placed by her father (‘To cool me off’); it is also the place where the father was neglected and left to die, after a shooting accident, by his implacable wife. But when the ‘ice-house’ returns metamorphosed, as a tomb in the Egyptian ...”

“... issue at hand, which is the relative strength of the moral claims made on us by human infants and young children. It is to this matter alone that McMahan wants us to direct our moral intuitions, and his case is constructed so as to clear the scene of any other potentially polluting concerns. This kind of disagreement about the value of thought-experiments in ...”

“... Fernande had been the second wife of Yourcenar’s proud father, Michel de Crayencour: the young daughter subsequently enjoyed sisterly or motherly relationships with her father’s ‘mistresses or quasi-mistresses and later his third wife’. As a septuagenarian in 1974, Yourcenar noted that she was more than twice as old as Fernande had been in ...”

“... your love dressed all in white, but come back only from the grave. The Victorians revelled in it. Stephen Foster’s audience grieved for Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair, the lost one ‘who comes not again’. The big Romantics all had their more portentous versions, from Lucy ceasing to be, to Shelley’s solipsistic sad heart, filled with grief ‘but ...”

“... on the Western Front. Over naval affairs the exchanges of heavy fire between Arthur Marder and Stephen Roskill reduced all others to awe-struck silence. On domestic politics Lord Beaverbrook and his acolyte A.J.P. Taylor gave us plenty to be going on with, even before younger specialists like Cameron Hazlehurst began to dissect the minutiae of Cabinet ...”

“... running away. The soldiers order the shopkeepers to clear away a barricade hurriedly assembled by young protesters. Teargas lingers in the air, but the incident is over. It is a typical day in Gaza, except that no one appears to have been killed or injured in the confrontation between the over-equipped Israeli Army of occupation and the Palestinians who want ...”

“... into her past and there are swarms of peripheral characters. Some (like the Dutchman with whom the young Liz made love on a Channel ferry in a force nine gale) cross the novel several times, but one never has the sense that this is a small world. Like the novel, it sprawls. Each of the leading trio of heroines has a brush with the dark side: madness, child ...”

“... might have been roped in from the group on the corner outside The Good Mixer. The priest is a young Irish boy with a big red peasant face and sandy hair and he, too, stripped of his cream-coloured cassock, could be wielding a pneumatic drill in the roadworks outside. I keep thinking about these characters during the terrible service and it reinforces what ...”

“... years from 1904 to 1915, spent in Trieste, saw the completion of Dubliners, the transformation of Stephen Hero into A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, the composition of Exiles and Giacomo Joyce, and the beginning of Ulysses. He returned briefly to Dublin in 1919-20, but by 1915 his artistic soul was forged. The ...”

“... his considerable commercial and critical success, was often very publicly under attack. Much of Stephen Gardiner’s biography is taken up with what critics and journalists said about Epstein’s work, but he doesn’t really ask what was in it that so irritated some and gave such pleasure to others. Gardiner is too often rhetorically ‘puzzled’ by ...”

“... well prepared for the challenge of restoring order in post-Saddam Iraq. Many of the half-educated young conservative activists who arrived in the first wave had spent their youth drinking neoliberal Kool-Aid, imbibing the illusion that freedom depends on ‘the near complete dismantling of government’. Such historically illiterate ideologues weren’t about ...”

“... her sights on a man who had spent much of his life at court under her father’s guidance: Francis Stephen, who was nine years her senior and inherited the small duchy of Lorraine in 1729. He was persuaded – with some difficulty – to renounce his hereditary rights and the provincial charms of Nancy and Lunéville. In exchange, he was offered the grand ...”