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“... part is the Irish word dáire, meaning ‘wooded island’. The London prefix dates from 1613 when James 1 granted a charter to the Society of Governors and Assistants, London, of the New Plantation of Ulster, known then and now as the Honourable The Irish Society. The Hon. The Irish Society was strictly a business proposition, like the East India Company, and ...”

“... stories of fictitious people in American films, and whose narrator is George Bailey – the James Stewart character from It’s a wonderful life. The family romance is the construction George Bailey discovers in, or reads into, the plots of the films noirs concerned: incestuous, adulterous, murderous and paranoid impulses are shown variously manifesting ...”

“... America centre-stage in the criminal drama was held by real people – by Billy the Kid or Jesse James, Wild Bill Hickok or Wyatt Earp. The American public expected its lawmen to be colourful popular heroes and the boundary between crime fiction and non-fiction was tenuous indeed. Allen Pinkerton, the most famous detective of the 19th century, was almost an ...”

“... officials to be arrested were Richard Trunkfield, a prison officer who had sold details about James Bulger’s killer Jon Venables; Alan Tierney, a Surrey police constable who was paid £1250 for passing information that John Terry’s mother had been cautioned for shoplifting, and Ronnie Wood for assaulting his girlfriend; and Tracy Bell, a pharmacy ...”

“... cutting a dash with a long scarf which she let trail dramatically behind her in the wind. ‘Grace Kelly,’ she said to Schackman. In her private memos, which are the most interesting – and best-written – part of Light’s haphazard book, she spelled out her ambivalence about being black. ‘I can’t be white and I’m the kind of coloured girl who looks ...”

“... me she had read my book, The Apparitional Lesbian, and ‘agreed with me entirely’ about Henry James and The Bostonians. She made me describe at length how I’d met my then girlfriend. (‘She wrote you a letter! And you answered? Terry, I’m amazed! I get those letters all the time, but I would never answer one! Of course, Terry, I’m ...”

“... and still is, even in a world where couples get to know each other first. Hilda Thomas and Thomas James Meredith-Morris, back then in decorous 19 –, wouldn’t have been very well acquainted. In that, of course, they were simply figures of their generation. What made their marriage more than a run-of-the-mill case of domestic estrangement was her refusal to ...”

“... distortions with Disney’s. I should add that Berger also described Pollock as ‘a little like James Dean’, at least in his penchant for acting dumb. Insofar as he was able to praise Pollock at all, Berger saw his work as a response to ‘the decadence of the culture to which he belongs’, asserting that ‘his talent will only reveal negatively but ...”

“... was the dominant emotion. A signalman described the consequences of an attack on the destroyer Kelly in 1940, on condition that he remained anonymous. That torpedo broke my nerve. Before, I always slung my hammock and undressed before getting into it, but after it I never slung it nor undressed when the ship was at sea. I slept as best I could on the ...”

“... by ministers and their wives. Waldstreicher suggests that it was Susanna Wheatley and Susannah Kelly Wooldridge, the wife of Dartmouth’s factor, Thomas Wooldridge, who ‘cooked up the occasion’ for Wheatley’s address to Lord Dartmouth. The poem was a turning point in Wheatley’s efforts to gather her poetry in a book. After the first proposal of ...”

“... years he just got hotter and hotter, probably helped, as he himself acknowledged, by the death of James Dean in 1955. Dean had been slated to play the middleweight boxer Rocky Graziano in Somebody Up There Likes Me; Newman was asked to replace him.‘By now, I’d become something of a movie star,’ Newman said of the success of Cat on a Hot Tin ...”

“... in the study of computing, robotics and futurism, and is discussed at length in both John Kelly and Steve Hamm’s Smart Machines and Tyler Cowen’s Average Is Over.2 Watson won, easily. Its performance wasn’t perfect: it thought Toronto was in the US, and when asked about a word with the double meaning ‘stylish elegance, or students who all ...”

“... start at the top and do it all over again!’ Henry Fonda, Kirk Douglas, Jack Benny, Jack Lemmon, James Mason and Steve McQueen all came to congratulate her after the show. When Judy Garland first heard her sing, she said: ‘I’m never going to open my mouth again.’ Frank Sinatra offered to set his goons on anyone who ‘ever bothers you’. JFK told her ...”

“... opposite Eel Pie Island, then sit for a while in the gardens of Orleans House, the octagon by James Gibbs c.1720, and all that remains of the house lived and entertained in by Caroline of Ansbach. The garden has some tall trees, the upper branches of which are alive with bright green and yellow birds which twitter like hawks. I look them up when I come ...”

“... its journey to judgment, lucky, I suppose, not to be seen off with a cheerful message from Henry Kelly. With it being Gerontius I’m surprised the whole thing isn’t a plug for Saga’s ‘specialised insurance for those of 50 and over’. Excepted from these strictures about Classic FM is Michael Mappin, who keeps the bad jokes to the minimum, isn’t ...”