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“... an energy that it would not otherwise espouse. Here is the unreconstructed ‘engine of comedy’, Rex Martin (‘the famous farting novelist’) and his diminutive son, Felix. Here is ‘Jillian Burnes’, a transsexual romancer. But these knockabout cartoons are absorbed into a chiaroscuro of the forgotten, denizens of the deep recalled and ...”

“... The motor vessel Aclinous left Birkenhead on 22 October 1938. It was an ordinary Dutch cargo ship making a routine journey to what was then the Dutch East Indies, and on this occasion it was also carrying a sick and lonely passenger: an experienced amateur sailor who was hoping that a sea voyage and a few months sailing around the Malay Archipelago would help restore his health and peace of mind ...”

“... dwindled rapidly, however, when the Catholic hierarchy made its disapproval public. Now, thanks to Martin Conway’s sensible judgments, and thorough researches in both Belgian and German sources, we know a great deal about what became of Rex and Degrelle under German occupation. The subject of collaboration often generates ...”

“... sentimentality which, at the Queen’s behest and with her all-too-active co-operation, Theodore Martin lavished on the Prince Consort; still less the ‘feline skill’ of Sidney Lee who, disregarding the advice of Edward VII, ‘Stick to Shakespeare, Mr Lee, there’s money in Shakespeare,’ produced a double-decker biography of his late majesty; least of ...”

“... well known outside the United States. His picaresque, autobiographical first novel, Geronimo Rex – a disorganised redneck version of The Adventures of Augie March – won the William Faulkner Prize and a nomination for the National Book Award when it came out in 1976. His 1978 short-story collection, Airships, was even more successful, winning two ...”

“... new Speaker. The advance was $4.6 million: not bad for an untried new writer. The row was not of Martin Amis proportions – this is not a very literary town – but there were some ugly whispers about conflict of interest. Mr Gingrich himself agreed to waive the advance in exchange for a share of royalties that will probably net him about the same. Nobody ...”

“... his body carried on a gun carriage draped in the Union flag, from the Guards’ Chapel to St Martin-in-the-Fields. Wagner underplays the extraordinary fact of this rite, normally reserved for a national hero, being accorded to a disgraced temporary brigadier. Only Collett puzzles over who could have given permission for this and fingers those notorious ...”

“... the context and mood of the time – Wodehouse agreeably exploiting British pastoral illusions, Rex Warner, in his parable The Aerodrome, warning us against a parochialism that could be dangerous in a hostile and regimented world, and so on. And now the business of making everything hang together, not only in the arts but in the political present and its ...”

“... were at a loss. I had never been anywhere that felt so solid and so empty. The band’s producer, Martin Hannett, drew on Joy Division’s centrifugal tendency and pushed the band’s music into arrangements that were broken down, unproductive and full of disused space. It was the sound of their city but it could have been describing the entire country. The ...”

“... styled ‘HRH’. Strange, then, that anti-Establishment figures like Churchill and Kingsley Martin and Beaverbrook, a sort of distillate of the Rex Mottram set, should have been ‘King’s Men’ of a kind in 1936 and have staked some part of their careers on defending this ugly little gargoyle. But perhaps not so ...”

“... consideration of disability in film. Like many a cultural archaeologist coming upon a rich site, Martin Norden does what Schliemann did at Troy and sinks his shafts in haste, turning up many treasures but profoundly disturbing the strata in the process. Norden lists a vast number of early silent films featuring people with disabilities – slapstick ...”

“... by royal decree in every English school for three hundred years, explained that in phrases like Rex et Regina beati, ‘the blessed King and Queen’, the adjective beati is plural (agreeing in number with Rex et Regina) and masculine (agreeing in gender with Rex), because ‘the ...”

“... what Tinniswood calls an ‘outsider’s house’ like nothing before. The interior had murals by Rex Whistler, lapis lazuli panels in the dining room and there was ‘one of the most dramatic bathing pools in England’: ‘flanked by raised quadrant pools and balustraded steps and fountains’, it seemed to float over the landscape. This was architecture as ...”

“... enfranchisement for black people in the United States has produced many martyrs: Medgar Evers and Martin Luther King; James Chaney, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman. And now Heather Heyer, the 32-year-old paralegal killed in Emancipation Park. It is true, as some have sanctimoniously pointed out, that even in her death, Heyer was a beneficiary of white ...”

“... edition Hockney came across must be John Mavrogordato’s, published by the Hogarth Press in 1951 (Rex Warner wrote the introduction). When Hockney’s prints were published a few years later, in 1967, Stephen Spender, a friend and early advocate, collaborated on a new translation with the publisher Nikos Stangos, himself Greek and a poet, of 14 of the Cavafy ...”