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“... novelist, I found myself in what seemed like a matter of months branch secretary of my local ward and assistant secretary of my constituency party in a period of exceptional turbulence. It was a rapid and brusque introduction to some of the realities of modern British party politics, a crash course I have not regretted in spite of the frustrations ...”

“... from a married police detective to a black teenage student writing a story about the serial-killer John Wayne Gacy. This is a woman who chooses to live dangerously. In every respect – her sexual aggression, her intellectual interests, her liberated lifestyle and her feminist leanings – Frannie is the kind of transgressive woman who gets singled out for ...”

“... state authorities were off-duty. He was taken in by a local Catholic monastery as its only child ward. Though kind at first, the monks deployed severe corporal punishment and a couple of them sexually abused him. The nicest monk, Brother Luke, turned out to be grooming him, and later kidnapped him and took him on a tour of West Texas, pimping him out and ...”

“... by comparison with Fleur Adcock’s ‘The Soho Hospital for Women’: Doris hardly smokes in the ward – And hardly eats more than a dreamy spoonful – but the corridors and bathrooms reek of her Players Number 10, and the drugtrolley pauses for long minutes by her bed. The flat poem does the difficult thing of seeming to be preoccupied not with itself ...”

“... The original newspaper story was ‘completely substantiated’. Patients had been ill-treated; ward staff had stolen their food; there was overcrowding and a shortage of properly trained staff; patients and doctors felt isolated and abandoned; and nurses believed they would lose their jobs if they complained. Crossman realised that publication of these ...”

“... III. Henry was only nine when he came to the throne in 1216, after the death of his father, King John. The last restrictions on his authority were lifted in 1227, but as late as 1232, when he was 25, he was described by the Margam annalist as a ‘rex puer’, king boy. Henry complained that he was still being treated as a boy in wardship by the counsellors ...”

“... There is a dry wind blowing through the East, and the parched grasses wait the spark. John Buchan, Greenmantle (1916) As Lloyd George’s wartime Director of Information, John Buchan urged Britain to support an incomprehensible Eastern war with the cry: ‘The Turk must go!’ At the beginning of 1916, the Turk was not going anywhere: he held fast at Gallipoli, driving off the Allied landings in January, and accepted the surrender of a British Mesopotamian invasion force at Kut, south of Baghdad, in April ...”

“... John Sutherland’s pithy, cynical Life of Scott is very much a biography of our time: irreverent, streetwise, set foursquare in a ‘real world’ in which careers achieve money and power and character is at least 51 per cent image. In its worldly wisdom it resembles the first of its kind, John Gibson Lockhart’s pioneering five-volume Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott (1837-8), though the drift of the two Lives is in opposite directions ...”

“... his own party – not least from MPs owing their Westminster seats to his popular appeal. Or so John Major came to feel by the end of 1992. Tony Blair must be thankful that things are now working out so differently for his government, and that, having been elected as New Labour, it is finding it so easy to govern as New Labour, free of the ideological ...”

“... mischievous matchmakers, innocent fun, uileann pipes, sea-wind in the hair. Even if you swap John Ford’s Ireland for something more urban and contemporary, say that of Roddy Doyle, in which a good night out is more likely to involve soul music and a ‘ride’, it is still possible to find yourself idealising: Ford and Doyle (pre-Paddy Clarke and ...”

“... not only because he worked hard at them, but also because he listened to advice, especially from John Gardner but also, more remotely, from Hemingway, Chekhov and V.S. Pritchett. One of the things he learned was the need for arduous revision, draft after draft. Another lesson was that the writer needs to trust the tale. Lawrence notoriously advised the ...”

“... and, eventually, illegal material. Michael was subject to a variant of what the psychologist John Suler identified in 2001 as the ‘online disinhibition effect’: the phenomenon whereby computer users feel shielded by the apparent anonymity of the web, encouraging behaviour in which they would not normally indulge in the real world. Like much of what ...”

“... of saints’ stories by Jacobus de Voragine – and the late medieval English sermon collection of John Mirk. The Orthodox Church, concerned to regulate monastic communities, severely penalised any behaviour that compromised masculine identity: shaving off one’s beard, and thereby appearing feminine, received a worse punishment than soliciting another man ...”

“... baby’, to ‘twist and shout’, to ‘let the good times roll’. The music was ‘designed to ward off the world outside and particularly adult life’, Springsteen said. It worked for him. Off stage, the past weighed him down; on stage, he said, ‘was where I master time’. Springsteen bet his life on music. ‘Whatever it took, I was in,’ he ...”

“... lore had Warhol moving into bed with his mother while his father slept upstairs with Paul and John [Warhol’s siblings],’ Gopnik writes. When Julia moved to New York to live with her son, people ‘thought she was stupid’, a friend said, ‘but she was brilliant beyond belief … and much smarter than Andy.’In high school, Warhol was not known for ...”