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“... correspondent is concerned, this is a model biography. His concentration on his subject as action-man imposes, however, its own limitations. Just as Moorehead found the adjustment to the more routine rhythms of the postwar world difficult, so does his biographer. Most of the excitement and élan goes out of his narrative once he has to settle down to telling ...”

“... about the unique situation of reminiscent and heartfelt applause from the audience whenever a man is seen to take a drink on screen.’ The quality of a Beverly Hills host’s illegal liquor was a mark of his sophistication, and by the time the Volstead Act of 1920 was revoked in 1933, the drinking habits of film-makers had become ingrained and were ...”

“... of the Bible has God creating Adam ‘of the sliym of erthe’. In most later versions, the first man emerges from ‘dust’. The imagery has stuck in modern Christianity. ‘Ashes to ashes, dust to dust’ is an oddly desiccated summary of life’s viscous circle: a euphemism posing as a proverb. It’s unclear why ‘sliym’ slipped out of the English ...”

“... wild, stormy miniatures through which large figures lurch, blindfolded and burdened: A mouldering man, a powdered and reconstituted one, walking the same so on and so on. Rutty road. Winter etc. Poached fields, all zugs and water. These figures are forsaken and solitary, their minds set against bodies: I was dying to ditch his head, maybe put his socks on a ...”

“... of the slope, aiming to give me a wide berth. After an hour or so of being avoided, an elderly man came near. When I asked him if he had any spare change he fixed me with a look of boiling contempt. Almost everything he had on was tan-coloured. His shoes, his jacket, his scarf – all tan. He came right up to me. ‘You should do something about ...”

“... the 4th Earl of Sandwich, was waiting on the dock to greet the ship with his lover, Martha Ray, who ‘manifested an unbounded affection towards the pretty creatures and a violent longing to be made mistress of them’. But even after ‘repeatedly signifying that she wished to have them, [she] went away dissatisfied’, and the animals were taken to ...”

“... Pablo, where else do you get a name like that?’ To us cocky British snobs who call the great man ‘Sir Peter Paul Rubens’ and don’t much mind what he called himself, the ‘mistake’ of the tourists is not tragical. But, for William Gaddis, this sort of ignorance leads up to the climax of The Recognitions, where his most admirable character ...”

“... that is characteristic of the book; in it he imagines the standard image of a missing father, ‘a man so badly needed in his wholeness and consequence’ that ‘life was twisted and distorted for the boy left behind, with his achingly empty hands, robbed of his masculine model, the football-playing man, the ...”

“... of the atomic bomb’, was never openly remorseful. But he was nothing if not ambivalent, as Ray Monk makes clear in his superb biography. When the fireball burst Oppenheimer remembered the words from Vishnu in the Bhagavad Gita: ‘I am become death, destroyer of worlds.’ It was his own idiosyncratic translation, and it became his most famous ...”

“... fluid trapped between the linings of the lung, had been identified on the CT scan of a 65-year-old man recently diagnosed with lung cancer. ‘Either it’s nothing,’ I told him, ‘an inflammatory response to the biopsy itself, or it’s from the cancer. If the fluid has cancer cells in it, that would change the prognosis.’ Cancer cells in the fluid, a ...”

“... time we got to Belfast the whole of Ireland would be under wraps like, as I said, ‘one of your man’s landscapes’. ‘Your man’s? You don’t mean Christo’s?’ In ‘Sushi’, the most brilliant of Muldoon’s many restaurant poems, he detaches himself in an equally effective way from his fancy, by inching it ...”

“... graduates. It is also one of the institutions that is bound to be hit hard by public sector cuts. Ray Mallon, Middlesbrough’s elected mayor, has polished his sales pitch until it shines, however uncertainly. Mallon was a detective superintendent in Cleveland Police who became nationally known in the late 1990s as Robocop, when his ‘zero ...”

“... Alan Hollinghurst after receiving a copy of his second novel, The Folding Star. The letter shows a man in a state of confusion or unhappiness about the choices he has made. Dear Mr Hollinghurst Thank you very much for asking your publisher to send me your novel The Folding Star. I have read it with great interest. It is beautifully done and gives very well ...”

“... in Moore’s first book, Self-Help (1985), in which Charlene is having an affair with a married man. He rings her while she’s at work: ‘Hi, this is Attila,’ he says in a false deep voice when you pick up your office phone. Giggle. Like an idiot. Say: ‘Oh. Hi, Hun.’ It’s the sort of practised gag that takes two: set-up, punchline, a bit of ...”

“... but also representations of death in the Third World: starving children, soldiers in Africa, a man pleading for his life beside a car in which a woman has been shot dead. At one point, Travis, played by Malcolm McDowell, passing the vodka to his friends, Johnny and Wallace (David Wood and Richard Warwick), asks: ‘When do we live? That’s what I want to ...”