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“... to call them roller blades and to think of myself as a blade runner, someone who is waiting for a Philip K. Dick novel to happen in. Specifically, I now glide about in the faster and more graceful Rollerblade Coolblades. These have a moulded and vented polyurethane boot with ratchet fastenings and high-rebound, polyurethane, Kryptonic wheels with sealed ...”

“... he interviews an elderly private eye who may or may not be the original of Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe, and who recounts an ostensibly real-life gangster episode which brought Chandler and the archetypal Marlowe together. Similarly the investigation of the Ellery Queen biographical tangle leads into a little ‘sealed room’ problem fortified by ...”

“... explained how ‘gloriously liberating’ he found the ‘scratch and sniff pictures’ of Philip Guston which ‘smelled of stale vodka and cigarettes, old spunk and dirty sheets’. Other artists were praised for shamelessly cocking their legs (De Chirico!) or for ‘drooling over fleshy naked women’ with a ‘quite shocking lack of ...”

“... can now only be done very artificially, when it constitutes a way of life summed up at the end of Philip Larkin’s sardonic poem as ‘reprehensibly perfect’. The natural thing today is to travel as if sitting in a room, an aeroplane or a car. Instant arrival leaves us sitting in another room, waiting for more drops, sprightly or otherwise, from the ...”

“... Her time working in a bar served her well: Riley is constantly attuned to the moment when the glass is about to fly. In publishing speak, her books are ‘slim and devastating’, which is the sort of epithet that would get an eye-roll from one of her narrators. Because they often play the bitch. It’s one of their endearing qualities.Riley is fluent in ...”

“... Demon Goes to Kill Death’, in Cathures, describes battlefields where the sand was fused to glass, And oil burned screaming along the waves, And shelled villages were smoking shells Or hells, though the shellers crowed to heaven. Morgan has strong feelings of solidarity with the war band, but he’s also rather taken with one of its enemies. Grendel is ...”

“... I visited on a Monday lunchtime, it was full of interested parties crowding around the illuminated glass cases of inscriptions, letters and notebooks, all of us trying to work out the distinction between hieroglyphic, hieratic and demotic versions of ancient Egyptian or between Sahidic and Bohairic dialects of Coptic alongside the rivalrous Egyptocryptologists ...”

“... to implicated stalker, caught in a pan-metropolitan drama of flow.The more I became absorbed in Philip Mosley’s translations of the essays, the more I identified with Vaes. There was one section of ‘An Antwerp Palimpsest’, originally published in 1993, so close to what I had tried (and failed) to say at that time that I began to think I must have ...”

“... used in her execution. As a final indignity, her corpse is commandeered by a pervert: ‘Two glass jars of formaldehyde, in which [her] severed breasts and private parts were on display, were uncovered by the police.’ Did she ever stand a chance? It’s strange that Li’s fiction replicates the structures of the world she sought to escape. Everywhere ...”

“... is a more extended reference: ‘Though Wonderlawn’s lost us for ever. Alis, alas, she broke the glass! Liddell looker through the leafery, ours is mistery of pain.’ The new edition, about which more in a moment, has ‘looker through the leafery’ where the old one had ‘lokker through the leafery’. This gets rid of what Roland McHugh glosses as the ...”

“... about them, or about the brain-damaged lunatics who imagine their bodies are made of pottery or glass. ‘Such people are demented,’ he says, ‘and I would surely be losing my own mind if I took them as a model or exemplum that might be applied to me.’ It is a transparent literary set-up. You obviously don’t have to be sane in order to be firmly ...”

“... all apparently of their own accord. While they were gathered in the front parlour, a wine glass escaped a locked cabinet in the kitchen and smashed; Alma’s teacup and saucer rose from her hands, the saucer splitting neatly in mid-air; a huge piece of coal in the grate careered across the living room and slammed into the wall. On an inside page the ...”

“... School of Cookery and Technical College of Domestic Science. In 1910, at Toxteth, she married Philip Tinne, a local GP born in British Guiana and educated at Eton and Magdalen College, Oxford. The Tinnes were a trading family who had made and lost money from time to time in shipping and sugar, and Emily and ...”

“... In February 1976 Hilton Kramer gave his approval to Philip Pearlstein’s ‘remorseless articulation of the authentic’. In November of the following year he alerted his readers to the absence, in the art of David Hockney, of ‘the spiritual quest at the heart of modernism’. Several years later, in June 1981, he gave warning that the stained canvases of Morris Louis, the leading member of the ‘Washington Colour School’, did not represent the breakthrough that other critics had announced ...”

“... art regardless of which side art is on. In their selection of her writings, Josie Billington and Philip Davis have wisely decided not to include much from her early collections (Aurora Leigh occupies around two-thirds of the space the volume devotes to poetry). Still, what they do include occasionally glints with better things to come. The poet notes in her ...”