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“... had a weekly ‘Tuesday Club’, considered a bonding ritual by the players and manager George Graham alike. It was, in fact, a massive piss-up that started after training on Tuesday and carried on through Wednesday, ending in time to run it off on Thursday morning. This is the world Wenger inherited when he took over as Arsenal manager. After the ...”

“... literary agency – The Author’s Empty Purse, published in l968 – with the same quotation that Graham Watson uses to conclude his reminiscences of a lifetime spent in the profession: This is the age of the middleman. He is generally a parasite. He always flourishes. I have been forced to give him some little attention lately in my particular business. In ...”

“... Illustration surely means just illustrating the image before you, not inventing it.’ Martin Harrison, the editor of the Bacon catalogue raisonné currently in preparation, has produced a scrapbook of illustrational materials from Bacon’s studio floor, among them dog-eared pages torn from magazines, newspaper cuttings with rusty paper clips ...”

“... book about the ‘Catholic sensibility’ of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Blake Morrison’s The Movement, Martin Amis’s Success, Tony Tanner’s Adultery in the Novel, Graham Greene’s Ways of Escape, Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song, Truman Capote’s Music for Chameleons, the Oxford American Dictionary, two books – by Dan ...”

“... air above it seems briefly to stand for the task they are performing. But what is that something? Martin Sorrell, whose translations are often less free than Mason’s, and never less impressive, takes a bolder turn: Madame holds herself too stiff in the next field where sons of toil flurry like snow; clutching parasol; trampling umbels; too proud for ...”

“... and log every instance, all the way from D.H. Lawrence and Anna Wickham through John Betjeman to Martin Amis, of one single placename’s use to connote a vast tundra of anodyne, apathetic anonymity. Here, though, Croydon is exactly where you’d expect Lodge to make his couple come from: a prompt for often disappointingly chummy humour at the expense of ...”

“... at Sir Roger Hollis, the hard-working, conventionally-minded former head of MI5, and his deputy Graham Mitchell. Mitchell, Nigel West tells us, had, at some time in his career, ‘gained something of a reputation as a Leftist’. This was a remarkable achievement, since Mr Mitchell had spent a slice of his early life as an enthusiastic assistant at ...”

“... extract from Staring at the Sun by Julian Barnes (b. 1946), although nothing from Shuttlecock, by Graham Swift (b. 1949), which gives the best description I know of the territory, real and psychological, in which his generation grew up in Britain: What attracted me then about Camber was less its whispering billows of sand and wheeling black-headed gulls ...”

“... a little disturbingly, of being closer to one of those rather different pieces of master-craft by Graham Greene or Le Carré than to its own progenitors. But this resemblance is no bad sign. It indicates change and maturity, a greater toughness and naturalness. In fact, this seems to me Golding’s best book yet, compounding and refining the virtues of The ...”

“... the closure of the studio marked the end of an epoch truncated by the assassination in Memphis of Martin Luther King: ‘the climate for an integrated business in a black neighbourhood changed.’ You can see what Marcus is talking about when he says the civil rights movement looks different in retrospect – but not because of anything to do with Elvis ...”

“... to Ann‘Ev’, confiding to her various hopes and fears, notably her passion for a boy named Martin, whom she sees on the train going to school. Through the agency of Ann ‘Ev’ the two are blissfully united. The other elderly gentleman in the house. A&O, a distinguished writer suffering from heart disease, and a character who seems to represent the ...”

“... Graham Robb, who is well known for his biographies of Balzac, Victor Hugo and Rimbaud, has written a history of what he calls a ‘vanished civilisation’, his theme being that in the 19th century, although homosexual love and homosexual fraternising were hardly admitted to exist, except perhaps in court reports, they were an omnipresent and vital part of the national life ...”

“... and the vice president, Hubert Humphrey), was assassinated, only two months after the murder of Martin Luther King Jr. The former governor of Alabama George Wallace ran a ferocious campaign as an independent, which broke new ground by rallying the white working class against intellectuals and anti-war hippies. Though always less popular than ...”

“... hero Sardanapalus as a model of regal behaviour. The books by Hermione de Almeida and Philip Martin are much more direct attempts to meet the challenge Byron makes to the literary critic. If he is a major poet, as not merely his reputation but the size and scope of his oeuvre insistently suggest, which are the great works? How far should we forgive his ...”

“... mentioned on the last page of Lord of the Flies. A story by ‘Taffrail’ called ‘Pincher Martin, O.D.’ makes possible the ingenious final sentence of Pincher Martin (Golding’s Martin, unlike his more honourable namesake, never even got his seaboots off before he ...”