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“... urkas’ – the criminal classes – drive the plot. First up comes Xan Meo (intelligentsia), a Ray Winstone-like middle-aged actor who plays cockney wideboys in British gangster flicks. Xan – who shares his surname with Duane Meo, John Self’s ‘whizzkid editor’ in Money – is sardonically described as a ‘Renaissance ...”

“... mother?’ Emma: ‘What if someone accidentally encouraged her friend to fall in love with the man she didn’t know she loved herself?’ Science fiction generally deals in larger ‘what ifs?’ about the underlying rules that structure the world. These can be experiments in wish fulfilment: ‘What if we could live on other planets?’ Or they can be ...”

“... the smugglers, and EU officials. Early​ one morning on the island of Lesbos, a short grey-haired man parked his motorbike under a pine tree and sat down on a pebbly beach littered with abandoned lifejackets – orange, red and blue. The carcases of rubber dinghies lay nearby. In the distance, on the other side of the channel, the Turkish mountains were ...”

“... childhood love. Alliteration surfaces from time to time, and his sixth poem, ‘Mony Ryal Ray’ quotes a line from the Middle English Perle; the poem’s epigraph, ‘For urthely herte myght not suffyse’, is from the same source – MacSweeney has often used a pastiche-medieval register for particular effects, in ‘Wolf Tongue’ (1978), for ...”

“... racism-awareness training. There was some bewilderment among white councillors. How could a black man be against the idea? In fact, many black people are bitterly opposed to it. The strongest critique there has been so far was written by A. Sivanandan, of the Institute of Race Relations. His reasons derive from his brand of Marxism, and are rather different ...”

“... and fibre art were displayed on which Sedgwick had scanned computer images of her body, an X-ray and CAT-scan images of her spine. Interviewed by Stephen Barber and David Clark, the editors of Regarding Sedgwick, she said that she was finding it hard to ‘take pleasure in writing’, and was much more drawn to the visual than the verbal, to texture ...”

“... too rancid for inclusion, why did the compiler exclude ‘The Background’, a gem of purest ray serene, as free of malice as it is of ambiguous wolf-boys? Here we have Henri Deplis using a windfall to commission a famous Italian tattooist to portray the Fall of Icarus across his back. The result is a slight disappointment as the client had ‘supposed ...”

“... Maxwell companies and pensioners by a string of accountants, including the receivers for the fat man’s bust businesses, Arthur Andersen. Most of these cases were ‘settled’ in deals whose terms became increasingly inaccessible as the accountancy firms swallowed each other up. Price Waterhouse swallowed Coopers and Lybrand, Touche Ross became Deloitte ...”

“... More precisely, The Mirror, which explores the historical and personal memories of a dying man, awoke and answered an old concern, born when Harrison saw the newsreel footage of bodies being bulldozed into pits at Belsen. ‘I have never forgotten that introduction to the filming of real life or, in this case, real and terrifying death. Nor how jarring ...”

“... first broadcast in 1951; five years later, Hancock’s Half Hour introduced two brilliant writers, Ray Galton and Alan Simpson, who between them created a character whose sense of social and intellectual confinement puts The Lavender Hill Mob’s bullion robbers in the shade and eventually – after Hancock had morphed into Harold Steptoe – blossomed into ...”

“... and quite different from narco-terrorism in Columbia, CIA-Contra terrorism in Nicaragua, strong-man terrorism in Panama, or the urban guerrilla terrorism of the Tupamaros. Peru is under siege from a wholly anachronistic but apparently invincible Maoist revolutionary army, Sendero Luminoso – Shining Path. This purist faction sees itself in conflict with ...”

“... I have found is in Mullen, who on page 642 states that ‘within a few days of completing An Old Man’s Love Trollope turned his hand to a new field, historical writing, and in the space of a few weeks produced a short book about Lord Palmerston.’ Trollope wrote Palmerston just before An Old Man’s Love, which was his ...”

“... on its way to meet an asteroid called Eros. This is not to mention infrared, ultraviolet, x-ray and optical telescopes orbiting the planet, peering into the farthest reaches of the universe. The most important thing in our lives now and at any time is the Sun: there are satellites orbiting it, monitoring it, measuring its hot breath. Satellites study ...”

“... of the Elephant and Castle Shopping Centre is not existential Brighton with Kylie Minogue and Ray Winstone onboard. For survivors of a century that witnessed the birth and death of both cinema and automobile cultures, the only reliable measure of time is the partial recall of films we have experienced. And it’s not where we were when we heard about the ...”

“... Wearing a protective covering of something dark-coloured over the eyes as one marched stopped a man from losing his sight, and keeping one’s feet constantly in motion, never still, and taking one’s footwear off at night helped prevent frostbite; but whenever men slept with their shoes on, the straps sank into their flesh and their shoes froze onto their ...”