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“... historical figures behind Homer’s epics are thought to have strode the earth. Bathtubs play a small but significant role in the Iliad. At the end of Book 10 the Greek heroes Diomedes and Odysseus go into the sea to wash off the sweat they have worked up during a night mission in which they have slaughtered a dozen Thracians and captured their horses. Then ...”

“... all for the second. Ministers and their loyalist supporters were of course worried that, however small the popular reform movement might be, it would grow and spread; and they focused this concern on the organisational structure of the LCS, which they described in a language that sounds convincingly urgent, as if, in this case at least, they really did ...”

“... June Forsyte is built up almost entirely from one or two such affectionate phrases as ‘her small decided hands’ (‘she had come back to Robin Hill on her stepmother’s death, and gathered the reins there into her small decided hands’). The trick is economical, for once the author has bounced us into premature ...”

“... selection edited by Giles Gordon and David Hughes. I made a mental note of the author’s name, Helen Dunmore, because I’d never heard of her before. A name to watch for, I thought, and watched for it in The Best of Best Short Stories, 1986-95. Dunmore was not included, which I thought a puzzling mistake on the editors’ part. In the intervening ...”

“... than Kavan but Callard managed to produce a much longer and less sketchy account of her life. Helen Woods/Anna Kavan was born in Cannes in 1901 to a wealthy father and a frivolous mother whose domination she was never to escape. As an infant Kavan claims she was sent away ‘to a place where there was nothing but snow and ice’. Her upbringing was love ...”

“... in a drawer and who lived his paltry life ‘under a bell-jar – or a thimble – in a very small dark’. The accompanying story concludes with the ironic exchange (about a very unlovely father, with some ugly secrets): ‘Bring him back! ... Better not.’ The dedicatee of Life Stories is Rebecca West. When one recalls how affectionately she brought ...”

“... few South Africans who have seen the struggle all the way through: Wentzel properly belongs to a small group with Mandela, Sisulu and a handful of others. As a female fighter against apartheid she has a longer record than Helen Suzman or Winnie Mandela. In a South Africa where that sort of record counts terribly, she has ...”

“... since the early 1950s. Retailing at anything from a few hundred to a few thousand dollars for a small vial, different versions of this indispensable elixir are hawked by laboratory supply companies the world over. Many of these products’ consumers have long been aware that there is a human story behind HeLa’s blandly commercialised ubiquity; now Rebecca ...”

“... former beatniks, post-situs and surrealists, second-hand book-dealers, pulp fanzine editors and small-press poets, refugees and survivors from the many literary-artistic ‘scenes’ of London’s recent – that is, post-Sixties – subterranean past. This, roughly, is the environment out of which Iain Sinclair’s writing comes. Before he moved into ...”

“... along the street by the breeze. It is often difficult to distinguish whether what you hear is a small noise close by (even indoors) or a greater noise a long way off; and the sound of bombs can be very deceptive.Eliot here seems to be pulling gently on the silken ties of the words, images, constellations that they knew to hold in place their love, even if ...”

“... commentary on some of his paintings from 1991 – introduced with the warning that ‘the small gap between the explanation of a picture and a picture itself provides the only possible perspective on painting,’ and tellingly titled ‘Disenchantment’ – Tuymans has explained that the source for this image was wrapping paper from the DDR, which ...”

“... a professional photographer. His head had been turned by Cartier-Bresson’s 1954 image of a small boy hefting two large wine bottles, which he spotted in the pages of Paris Match. For a while, Killip pursued a career on strict 1960s Bailey-Blowup lines: he moved to London as assistant to Justin de Villeneuve, Twiggy’s manager (and formerly a Mayfair ...”

“... inference by adding, with a nod to sanity: ‘If design govern in a thing so small.’ Now what is Meyers’s ‘new reading’ of this sonnet, which he regards as Frost’s ‘greatest poem’? Meyers’s observations are tediously un-new (drawing as they do on Randall Jarrell and Lionel Trilling); but he adds one triumphant new ...”

“... for it with Hera and Aphrodite, and before too long Paris, their adjudicator, will be seducing Helen and Agamemnon will be sacrificing his daughter to secure a favourable wind for Troy. There will follow long accounts of battles and heroic deeds, perhaps something on the untimely death of Thetis’ son, Achilles, Odysseus’ victory in the dispute over his ...”

“... people whom he could move around ‘like God’. Eudora Welty’s people live mostly in, or near, small free-floating towns like Morgana, with its water tank and courthouse and its ‘Confederate soldier on a shaft’ that resembles ‘a chewed-on candle, as if old gnashing teeth had made him’. They go their own ways and are not haunted by history. You can ...”