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“... on even smaller screens. The emerging new comic style was called ‘stand-up’, a term whose very name suggested immobility.Low comedy may have been lost by then to popular American entertainment, but it had been found as high art by the international theatrical avant-garde. The model for Antonin Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty turned out to be the Marx ...”

“... East Finchley, London, to Jack Panos – a Greek Cypriot restaurant owner who had anglicised his name – and his English wife, Lesley Harrison. Georgios (‘Yorg’ to the family but mispronounced as ‘Yog’ by Andrew Ridgeley, whose version stuck) was the youngest of three children, and the only boy. He was six months old when Lesley’s brother Colin ...”

“... Sybil, with titles like The Five of Me (1977), Tell me who I am before I die (1977), The Minds of Billy Milligan (1981). Perhaps the most recent instance is The Flock (1991). One way in which these stories differ from the old romantic tradition of doubles is that they are all doctrinaire. They present in novelesque form a current theory of what it is to be a ...”

“... heights, and finished him off, was Hollywood. In 1943 Paramount hired Chandler to work with Billy Wilder on the screenplay for James M. Cain’s Double Indemnity. The film, directed by Wilder, was a critical and popular smash hit, garnering Oscar nominations for Best Picture and Best Screenplay. Spurred by this success, RKO produced the first Marlowe ...”

“... trumpet; Charlie Haden, a white bassist from a family of country singers in Shenandoah, Iowa; and Billy Higgins, a drummer from Los Angeles with a flawless sense of swing – to New York to perform at the Five Spot. These were ten weeks that shook the jazz world. The Five Spot engagement is usually remembered as marking the birth of free jazz, but the ...”

“... his being an extra-terrestrial agent sent down by a higher authority to save the world’. The name of the hero was to be Boreas Brown. Gray worked on this novel, off and on, for the next three decades, Boreas Brown turning into Obbly-Pobbly, Obbly-Pobbly into Gowan Cumbernauld. From Whitehill he went to Glasgow School of Art, then worked reluctantly as a ...”

“... up again, like Troy from beneath a sea of sand and the ruins of many lesser cities with the same name. But if a conspiracy theory is preferred, there is always the chance that the feminist cheerleaders, far from being unaware of the fact that Hollywood had once projected female equality, were aware of it but didn’t want to emphasise it, lest they kick a ...”

“... house, a larger-than-life man called Vautrin, is suspected to be a seasoned criminal by the name of Jacques Collin, who has escaped from prison. The policeman lets slip that Vautrin ‘took the rap for another man’s crime, a forgery committed by an extremely handsome young man he was fond of’. Then he tells Michonneau that they need to get close to ...”

“... fistfights to practise for the coming revolution. ‘The first time Murray got hit by a cop with a billy club’, Biehl writes, was ‘while carrying an evicted family’s furniture back up a stairwell’. In 1939, after being expelled from the Young Communist League for criticising the Nazi-Soviet Pact, Bookchin became a Trotskyist and dropped out of high ...”

“... was ‘formidable’ between 40 and 60, and felt fine in his sixties. Now he can’t remember the name of the pills he’s supposed to take for his diabetes, he starts to do a sum and can’t remember what he has just multiplied by what. He feels dizzy at times. He says all this with genuine impatience and distaste, but also with an energy which comes out as ...”

“... are a nation of stingy book-lovers, and the members of the London Library are as British as the name suggests. They want their million old books, their thousands of new titles annually, their full range of current journals, their smart West End address, their expert staff – all on the cheap. The full subscription of £80 a year is if anything a better ...”

“... cases with which Ginzburg deals, confessed to having attended the sabbat, to having ridden on a billy goat, to having sold his soul to the Devil. (The Inquisitors themselves, however, came to suspect the veracity of these statements, all of them extracted under torture, and Olivo, who then denied everything he had previously said, claiming the only act he ...”

“... diminished surrealism of the Dreamland funfair, to dismiss such transitory cultural pretenders as Billy Childish (‘a hundred records, all bad’) and Dame Tracey Emin. They peddle bad memories of the Estuary, Chatham and Margate, for the shocked delight of bored metropolitans (who never have to go there). Seabrook lives it, thrives on the way he’s been ...”

“... exposure of Rae’s bottom is arousing,’ Thomson notes.) There it is again, pink and bare, in Billy Bathgate, where she is the moll of Dustin Hoffman’s hopelessly unconvincing gangster boss (1991). And again in that schlocky piece of nonsense, Malice (1993), where she works in a childcare centre and wears ‘baggy jeans and flannel shirts’ by day but ...”

“... from Paris in 1952 when the aeroplane – ‘it was an Air France: Air Chance is a better name’ – ‘caught fire and scenes of extraordinary panic occurred’. Berlin mentions this, jokily and in passing, in several letters, but Alice James, the wife of William James’s son Billy, gets the full story of the ...”