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“... in New York City. ‘It was wonderful, and revelatory as it always is,’ he told his friend Tony White. ‘I learn more about people and myself in NY than anywhere else. I got offered a job in a tough-queer 3rd Avenue bar the day before I left, and if I hadn’t been under contract to Berkeley I’d have accepted it’ (he’d been given a visiting ...”

“... the things were supposed to adorn the family automobile in perpetuity in the way that Saint Christopher medals adorned the dashboards of Catholic drivers all over America in the simpler days before Vatican II. Things are different in Miami, though. There, almost three years after the Reagan victory, a significant number of cars in the Cuban-American ...”

“... Two of these speakers told Pizarro that ‘their lord the dead man agreed’ to his proposal, as Christopher Heaney describes in his chronicle of five hundred years of encounters with the lively Andean dead.Soon after capturing Atahualpa, the conquistadors looted the palace of his father, Huayna Capac. They took his gold ornaments but left his preserved body ...”

“... its implications. This is a good period for English poetry. Not only is there Raine. There is also Christopher Reid, whose work bears a sufficient similarity to that of Raine for one to talk of a Martian school. Arcadia, Reid’s first collection, is an elegant and original book whose virtues remind one of the world of painting. It is not surprising that ...”

“... overlooking the sea. The beach was beautiful, part fine sand, part tiny pebbles. Even the local white wine was surprisingly drinkable.’ If Knowlson’s story is going to follow Beckett on his hols, why stop here? Why was the plonk ‘surprisingly’ drinkable? Is this a comment on Sardinian wines in general or just those of that particular year? What ...”

“... than many sentimental retrospectives allow. But now it is the Republican Party which shelters the white supremacists and religious bigots. Gingrich didn’t really hate the Sixties. But for tactical reasons, he needs the people who did. Much of this book is taken up with a restatement of the Contract with America on which the GOP took both Houses in ...”

“... whose words the whole dedication turns: John Webster, in the note ‘To the Reader’ before The White Devil. Browning’s Elizabethanised play has its affinities with Webster: moreover, it was canny of him to emend Webster’s prefatory words so as to reduce them to a single-minded praise of Shakespeare (and then of Landor). For these are not the very words ...”

“... I can still see him, though, rebuking the abysmal nosh in the House of Lords dining room (‘the white wine is warmer than the food’) and later showing up uncomplainingly in the near faultless squalor of Muriel’s Colony Room Club or (is it still there?) the Toucan in Gerrard Street. I still wish that Gore Vidal had had his way with Hugh Gaitskell, and ...”

“... but you can’t help sounding like it when you use such a locution as ‘when I and Sean White took him to Dublin Castle’. After you ... Likewise the author of Purity of Diction in English Verse is perhaps not abnegatingly absent when he attributes to F. R. Leavis a book called New Bearings in English Verse. Still, Davie’s not being entirely in ...”

“... viewer’s superior TV-knowingness. ‘Image-Fiction’, as he called the progeny of DeLillo’s White Noise (1985), was in danger of becoming similarly tainted. Though ostensibly aimed at ‘reimagining what human life might truly be like over there across the chasms of illusion, mediation, demographics, marketing, imago and appearance’, it ‘most often ...”

“... It’s hard to know how seriously Chandler took these musings. On top of being a relapse-prone white-knuckle drunk, he was a lonely man who preferred the mail to company and took pains to make his letters entertainingly cantankerous. Still, it’s clear that he had trouble reconciling the clean-limbed notions of ‘romance’ he’d absorbed in his youth ...”

“... defenceless civilians abroad and at home, but his ventures into armaments produced a litter of white elephants. His massive kok-saghyz plantations took valuable arable land out of food production without ever producing a viable source of ‘plant-based rubber’. The shale oil refineries and peat-based fuel extraction plants were a costly irrelevance. His ...”

“... time of the great 18th-century landscape gardeners and on through Robinson and Jekyll right up to Christopher Lloyd and Beth Chatto. The highest achievement in gardening, even when plots are small, has always been seen as the creation of a picture. Gardens in which plants are grown for food, medicine or animal feed have their traditions, but their look is ...”

“... when a Scots Guards platoon executed 24 perfectly harmless Chinese plantation workers. Instead, Christopher Hale – a journalist with long experience reporting from Germany and South-East Asia – has put together a massive history of the British presence on the Malay peninsula. He tries to explain the outbreak of the jungle guerrilla war which began in ...”

“... and had a spiral staircase installed inside a semi-circular tower. He painted the internal walls white, laid floorboards reclaimed from a 17th-century house and set about filling the place with the found objects and pieces of furniture he felt worked best with his art collection. The collection itself had taken a while to acquire, much of it coming through ...”