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“... irrational act seem rational’). ‘The last 18 years like a bad Dostoevsky novel,’ he wrote to Paul Elmer More in June 1933, on the cusp of his separation from Vivien. In an essay of 1924 he remarked that Dostoevsky’s characters are aware of ‘the grotesque futility of their visible lives, and seem always to be listening for other voices’, which ...”

“... he replied. The Irish Catholic church has always scattered its clergy abroad, and there has been a lay branch of this pastoral exodus as well – nurses, for example. There is a sense in which the Dubliners Bono and Bob Geldof are self-advertising versions of Irish missionaries. The English and Scottish Catholic churches have always relied heavily on Irish ...”

“... lover. His 1991 essay ‘Circumfession’, written in stream-of-consciousness as his mother lay dying, moves between reflections on circumcision, death and St Augustine, and an elegiac remembrance of his childhood. His real ambition, Peeters suggests, was to be a poet or novelist; towards the end of his life, he spoke less of his philosophical legacy ...”

“... Though they paid for their audacity when they were arrested and tortured by the suspicious Pope Paul II, they were back at it by the 1470s. Underground Rome continued to tempt explorers, especially the buried Golden House of Nero, where artists discovered ancient Roman decorative motifs, which they christened ‘grotesques’ and used to decorate Vatican ...”

“... were indications, sounds and airs, that the black magic of the Mafia was known to the island. Paul Castellano was a Staten Island householder who can rarely have set foot on the ferry and who was eventually to stay at home, save for the occasional progress by limousine across the bridge. The mansion he lived in, nicknamed the White House, stood on top of ...”

“... and carefully to record all variants indicated by real-life evidence. Thus: ‘When the young Paul Morel goes out, it is with his younger brother Arthur; they are “the lads”. When Lawrence went out to play, it would have been with [his sister] Ada.’ Or: ‘Lydia Lawrence’s reaction to her husband probably had far more in common with the revulsions ...”

“... now ready to commit adultery in print. Baldly, Three Weeks tells of an immature young Englishman, Paul, who is sent abroad by his family to break up an entanglement. In the Alps he meets a footloose predator in the form of a Balkan queen who plays spider to his fly, Venus to his Adonis. What gift should he buy her, in Lucerne, but a tiger skin? Within three ...”

“... so you might as well eat whatever you like. Then again, my own GP told me to eat fibre and lay off animal fat, and another doctor handed me a jar of herbal supplements, the name and purpose of which I now forget. So far as the dietary experts are concerned, I’m not too sure what they now coherently say about the virtues and vices of Tuscan bean ...”

“... emergent democracy to rally round principles determinedly hostile to the entrepreneurial. The crux lay in their ability to control their workforce not only in the factory but, prospectively, at the polls. The great technical obstacle to their dominating Westminster and replacing aristocratic government was that the massive under-representation of the great ...”

“... in the industry, the responsibility for making sure that customers received proportionate benefits lay with Offer. Stephen Littlechild is an economist of the Hayekian school, well-known for his belief that the role of regulation is merely to encourage competition. His initial supervision of the RECs was so lenient that 11 out of 12 were allowed to raise their ...”

“... Booker, the original editor, was fired while on holiday in 1963; how he went on, in 1976, to lay into the Eye just as Goldsmith, who had issued 63 writs against the magazine and its distributors and sought to bring a private suit for criminal libel, appeared to have it on the ropes; how John Wells felt that his jokes were ‘ostentatiously removed, spat ...”

“... 5 February) is the Clare chasuble, commissioned sometime between 1272 and 1294 by an aristocratic lay patron, Margaret de Clare. Later cut down from its original size to give more freedom to the arms, the chasuble (the priest’s outer garment) is formed of a ground of blue kanzi, a luxurious fabric of silk and cotton imported from Iran. Against this ...”

“... been burning, or who or what sparked the blaze. When I asked the then chairman of Ryton Golf Club, Paul Whittaker, how the fire under the course started, he could only tell me when they first became aware of it. Fires underground can be started by spontaneous combustion, if the right elements are present: the mineral pyrite, when combined with oxygen, produces ...”

“... literally) painstaking determination to ‘fix up’ her eccentric clientele? Her ‘biographer’ Paul Bailey clearly believes she has that fabled ‘heart of gold’, that she is a kind of Lady with the Red Lamp, imaginatively caring for the wanking-wounded, the casualties of the sex war. But there are many differences between her set-up in Streatham and the ...”

“... If anyone could bring us close to the mystery of Genghis Khan’s achievements, it was the late Paul Ratchnevsky. Not only had he been instructed in all the relevant languages by Paul Pelliot, the outstanding figure in the heroic age of French scholarship on Asia, but he had specialised in the laws and customs of the ...”