Wednesday, 4 March 2015

They eat nothing but offal cooked in rancid olive oil in Turkey

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Bond sat down in a comfortable-armed chair and took the small tumbler the waiter offered him. He lifted it towards Kerim and tasted it. It ...
Tuesday, 3 March 2015

A great deal of killing has to be done in the USSR

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A great deal of killing has to be done in the USSR, not because the average Russian is a cruel man, though some of their races are among th...
Monday, 2 February 2015

The only discourtesies I have met with have been from Prussians

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The only discourtesies I have met with have been from Prussians. The Bavarians I know have all been delightful, and as for the Tyrolese, I c...
Friday, 30 January 2015

The colour of old brown sherry

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Madge Bettany was good to look at. She was slight to the verge of thinness, with a well-poised head covered by a mop of curly dark brown hai...
Wednesday, 28 January 2015

Labyrinthine tales of faction-fighting and off-the-record press briefings that reminded me of nothing so much as the British Labour Party

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Azhar, they told me, was not the meek and inoffensive character he seemed, a point they illustrated by recounting labyrinthine tales of fac...
Wednesday, 14 January 2015

If men's standing in the world could be toppled by an ill-advised choice of hat, English literature would be dramatically changed

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There is true art in it, this command of tea and dinner tables; this animating correctness. Men may congratulate themselves for writing tru...
Friday, 26 December 2014

Pussy Galore ... can scarcely be taken for standing for 'the eternal feminine'

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In every  story it is, of course, a different woman, each given a flip, thowaway, double-entendre -type name such as Pussy Galore, Honeychil...