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“... this technique into his most significant creation, the Daily Mail. In 2012, the journalist John Rentoul produced a satirical essay on the art of the newspaper headline called Questions to Which the Answer Is ‘No!’ It was a homage to Harmsworth, the Mail and their many imitators. Harmsworth had a lifelong thirst for curious facts. On a world tour ...”

“... by hydraulic rams to block the flow of water and seal off the gap in the town’s defences. Adam Robinson, the Environment Agency engineer responsible for building it, told me it would last for a century, and, even allowing for climate change, cut the chance of sea flooding for the 14,000 homes it protected to 0.33 per cent in any given year. Since 95 per ...”

“... mid-Sixties we began to make a swap in the evening and thus became acquainted with the writing of John Healy in the Backbencher column of that newspaper. He wrote every week about a new breed of Fianna Fail politician. He wrote with wit and irreverence, but he wrote from the inside and he conferred a huge glamour on the young ministers in Lemass’s ...”

“... nation. The children ride with their father, listening to his wise words, like the Swiss Family Robinson, and the good mother cooks and cleans, never complaining that the children don’t go to school, as sweetly dim as a Mrs Noah in a toy ark. As it is, plenty; As it’s admitted. The children happy And the wife devoted To this as it is Let his thinning ...”

“... Stevens’s Collected Poems came out in the mid-1950s. It was ‘a major imaginative event’, John Hollander said, and John Ashbery – in his first piece for the New York Review of Books – hailed Ammons as an ‘American original’. ‘I was born big and jaundiced (and ugly),’ Archie Randolph Ammons wrote, ‘on ...”

“... Man are the two ‘foundation texts’ of the English working-class movement. It is above all in John Bunyan, he argues, that we find ‘the slumbering Radicalism’ which was preserved through the 18th century, and broke out again and again in the 19th. Bunyan was born in a cottage on the edge of Elstow, a village near Bedford, in November 1628. His father ...”

“... of guilty of preaching only. Mr Bushel was directly bullied by the whole bench: Alderman Sir J. Robinson: I tell you, you deserve to be indicted more than any man that hath been brought to the bar this day ... Mr Justice May: Sirrah, you are an impudent fellow ... The Recorder: You are a factious fellow: I will set a mark on you ... The Mayor: I will ...”

“... half-whisper that someone called Colm Tóibín was in the library looking at the correspondence of John Butler Yeats, which had been transcribed, then typed, then donated to the library by William M. Murphy, John Butler Yeats’s biographer. And now I looked up from the Yeats letters to find a man looking at me. It struck me ...”

“... Foe, where the silent other who resists interpretation is Friday. In Coetzee’s reworking of Robinson Crusoe, the tale of Cruso’s island kingdom is told to the famous man of letters, Daniel Foe, by Susan Barton, a castaway who spent a year on the island before being rescued by a passing ship and taking Friday back to civilisation with her. Much of the ...”

“... them himself ... It so happens that this thumbnail portrait fits Andrew’s younger brother, John Matthew, who was educated at Stonyhurst, better than it does Andrew himself, who was brought up by a private tutor at Marbot Hall. But what it describes is one half of the English experience Hildesheimer presents, the foil against which the other half ...”

“... of his expenses claims. Now he discovers that there is an article by one of his predecessors, John Major, which attacks him in highly personal terms. He decides he must ring the Telegraph’s editor to put the record straight. He has to do this on a train to Bradford, where he is due to unveil a memorial in honour of a local police officer, Sharon ...”

“... by his translation of the Austrian folk tale Bambi, which carried a moist Foreword from John Galsworthy.) This was the literary bridge that carried Chambers from relative hackdom on the Daily Worker to pre-eminence at the Stalinist flagship of letters, The New Masses. Indeed it was his usefulness and ability in this department that got him ...”

“... Did the sweet shop inspire the naming of Miss Pynsent, the dressmaker who brings up Hyacinth Robinson in The Princess Casamassima (1886)? Surely Hyacinth himself, who remains diminutive even when fully grown, is what the small boy might have been without James’s privileges: an aspiring writer who has to work as a mere bookbinder, he shares with his ...”

“... supporters seem to see limits to liberalism. On 20 February the Free Church Daily Mail columnist John MacLeod tweeted that ‘Kate Forbes was thrown untold gotcha questions today about same-sex marriage etc, but handled them well. I unaccountably missed all the interviews when Humza Yousaf was asked about how he felt about suicide-bombers and the sort of ...”

“... of secret masters: Gerald Kersh, James Curtis, Mark Benney, Robert Westerby, Alexander Baron, John Lodwick, Jack Trevor Story. They have been struck from the canon, these technicians, these life-enhanced witnesses. They are noticed only by slumming journalists (who have built up their own collections of the stuff) or by condescending arts programmers ...”