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“... but in his youth had few other aesthetic pleasures, confessing to his sister: ‘Pictures give me no pleasure, architecture a little but practically none. Sculpture absolutely none, moreover music, poetry and singing give me no pleasure. It is a sad fact.’ He was never sent to school and could not spell. It is all too ...”

“... Herman Diaz, 52, choked to death on an orange; several other detainees tried to revive him but no guard came to his aid. Dashawn Carter, 25, hanged himself two days after returning to Rikers from a state psychiatric hospital. George Pagan, 48, was plainly ill during the nine days he spent on the island, eating little and urinating, defecating and vomiting ...”

“... and an alcove whose wall was thick with black mould. When it was occupied, the patrons used the hall, which was, except for the sink and the hole, indistinguishable from the lavatory. This is one thing I remember about the pub; the other thing I remember is that the pub was called the Jesse James. Someone told me it was named for James because his people ...”

“... into a ménage à trois: the girl loves a soldier, but the soldier is flirting with death. No scene is too humdrum to be energised by the ubiquity of death. In Ghost MacIndoe, Jonathan Buckley introduces the war in the fifth line with the sentence: ‘The postman tipped his helmet to Alexander’s mother.’ The postman wears a helmet? Something is out ...”

“... in the market square’ and that anyone is entitled to have an opinion about it. Lancaster was no egalitarian, he mourned the passing of the upper middle class and the dwindling influence of the Anglican church, but he had the English dislike of experts and ‘the vast army of salaried culture-hounds’ who had introduced to Britain that hitherto ...”

“... cause harm, and that only the devil, with God’s permission, wielded such power; but there was no agreement on this point. Katharina had sued for slander, but her opponents belonged to a powerful faction which was after her blood. As a 68-year-old widow of modest means and status, she would need all the help she could get to avoid the fate of a convicted ...”

“... when an unhealed wound remains? Not long before the vote, the point was cruelly rubbed in. John Howard’s Liberal-Coalition government made the unusual decision to invade its own country, by sending the Australian Defence Force into the Northern Territory. His aim was to deal decisively with concerns about child abuse and corruption among the mainly ...”

“... with their secretaries. I imagined there were sub-species of adultery going on, up and down John Dalton Street, Cross Street, Corn Exchange, but we never did matrimonial, or if we did the clerks locked the files away from me, so my most recent take on male duplicity came from the novels of Thomas Hardy. The 1960s were behind us, the era of free ...”

“... for London to become a great artist. His mother was distraught, his father furious, but there was no doubt in Haydon’s mind either of his vocation or of his genius. He could have worked in his father’s bookshop and inherited a secure, independent income but he didn’t want to. So he was rude to the customers and finally, when one of them asked for a ...”

“... proliferate. An attraction for some must be that it is now safely dead and buried: there is no live bear to break out of its cage and retaliate. In 1995 Francis Beckett added his Enemy Within to the growing list of works. His researches were thorough; he had gone round meeting veterans of bygone days, nearly all of whom were happy to chew over their ...”

“... He promised me a patent’ – though the watch never worked as well as Hooke had hoped and no patent was ever issued for his device. In the mid-1670s, a solution to the longitude problem was worth the astounding sum of £4000 to its inventor, at a time when an annual income of £50 would just about qualify you for the middle station of London ...”

“... wounded supporters (including Booth in The Poet’s Plight) are still contending against them. John Osborne (director of American Studies at Hull) attempted to refute those denigrating Larkin on ideological grounds in his 2008 Larkin, Ideology and Critical Violence; his new book, Radical Larkin, fortified with literary theory, wishes to reclaim Larkin as a ...”

“... passed through long corridors and many locked and relocked doors, I was ushered into a large hall containing about a hundred people … Many of the inhabitants underwent major brain operations, and consequently many were shaven-headed. Others were swathed in bandages and were disfigured by post-operative bruises and black eyes.The patients were dressed ...”

“... always, more ambiguous. In some senses we can be grateful. Seven of his plays remain, and there is no real evidence that any whole works have been lost. The brevity of his opus is a matter of tragic circumstance: he was just 29 when he was stabbed to death in Deptford. But though the ratio of transmission seems good, the quality is not. At least two of his ...”

“... the Queen’s letters, decided to quit teaching at Eton and move to Cambridge. King’s showed no desire to elect him a fellow – and still less, as he hoped when Austen-Leigh died, to elect him Provost. When his old friend Stuart Donaldson used his influence as Master of Magdalene to offer Benson a fellowship there, kind friends took as much of the ...”