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“... based Holmes’s deductive abilities on those of a real doctor, the surgeon Joseph Bell.) Nonetheless, the hero-in-two-persons arrangement is vestigially present in many cyclically narrated comics. Probably the best-loved example is the duality of Snoopy and Charlie Brown. Snoopy, the romantic ‘hero’, is variously an attorney, a pulp ...”

“... in its detail: undergraduates on night fire-watching duty taking turns to stay awake in the bell tower of Christ Church, the smell of blackout curtains, the ominous poetry of the blackout itself, the eight-second interval between trucks in a military convoy, with a press of bicycles behind the last one. This section is written in the first ...”

“... We won’t find, for instance, Burns Singer, one of the most original poets of the Fifties, or David Wright and John Heath-Stubbs. All three were friends of Graham, and their inclusion might have helped the Forties and Fifties out of their New Apocalypse v. Movement stand-off. Hamish Henderson, whose 1948 Elegies for the Dead in Cyrenaica (reprinted by ...”

“... for the fish in the pond above. Of the chapel at Crimplesham Hall they write: ‘A tall spidery bell-tower is all there at first appears to be; but further inspection reveals a rather substantial building so encrusted with ivy and creeper that it is hard to make out the overall shape.’ As the DOE and the National Trust have stripped ivy and owls from any ...”

“... professes a sympathy, intentionally puts himself in extreme situations, then writes about them. David Foster Wallace (to whom Zambreno doesn’t relate) in his fiction seemingly did not. So when Keeler, offended by Zambreno’s appropriation of the identities of these women, asks, ‘at what point does recognising feminine likeness turn into an erasure, a ...”

“... that she, quite early on, had allowed herself to be talked into a ‘trivial’ affair with Clive Bell. Desmond, whose own early dalliances were theoretically intense but not physically consummated (all the girls liked him far too much for that to be allowed to spoil it), was probably far more upset by this than he admitted. The outcome, at any rate, was that ...”

“... of The Child in Time, for example, Ian McEwan lists Christina Hardyment’s Dream Babies, David Bohm’s Wholeness and the Implicate Order and Joseph Chilton Pearce’s Magical Child. In Time’s Arrow, Martin Amis acknowledges, among a number of others, Robert Jay Lifton’s The Nazi Doctors, Lawrence Shainberg’s Brain Surgeon and ‘the works of ...”

“... John had a marvellously dry sense of humour and always a pithy comment, ever an academic. Nigel Bell John and I had worked together, off and on, for I suppose more than twenty years both at the TLS and the LRB and I grew to admire him hugely for his learning, wit and humour. First I was his editor and then he was my editor and I enjoyed both ...”

“... signet ring bearing on its bezel the initials ‘W.S.’ It was bought for 36 shillings by Robert Bell Wheler, a local historian, and later donated to the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, where it still resides. When the Romantic painter Benjamin Robert Haydon heard news of the discovery he wrote excitedly to his friend Keats: ‘If this is not Shakespeare who ...”

“... Taking the clapper out of the bell makes no sense, but this is what we do too often with D.H. Lawrence. The writer who seemed to believe in dualisms – blindness over sight, blood over mind, pagan over modern, and so on – gets broken into two like a stable door. Readers, critics and biographers insist on splitting Lawrence into writer or preacher, dogmatist or poet ...”

“... conglomerates have had to let it go. The Oxford University Press feel no obligation to keep David Gascoyne’s Collected Poems in print. Faber and Faber get along very nicely on Tom Eliot’s singing and dancing pussy-cats. The Cambridge Festival (don’t tell them) is nowhere, it isn’t happening. What’s the story? Even the participants don’t ...”

“... Bolsheviks’ old opponents in the Marxist revolutionary movement) such as Boris Nikolaevsky, David Dalin and Rafael Abramovich – and Alexander Kerensky, the leader of the Russian Provisional government overthrown by the Bolsheviks in 1917. When Nikolaevsky and Dalin visited the DP camps in Germany, Russian DPs anxiously waiting for US visas saw them as ...”

“... were either soured by authorial complaints against Olwyn Hughes, Ted Hughes and the Estate (e.g. David Holbrook, Edward Butscher) or have come to nothing (e.g. Lois Ames, Harriet Rosenstein). Most of the book-length literary criticism is unimpressive. There isn’t much to choose, for example, between Margaret Dickie Uroff (‘As they developed, Plath came ...”

“... a quintessential experience with their fellow Americans. As it turned out, not even the terrible David Letterman managed to squeeze off a burst about Mr Simpson or anything related to the trial. The evening was, as some magazines have taken to claiming on their covers, ‘100 per cent O.J.-free’. In truth, the industry does not quite know what to make of ...”

“... early at the old Baltimore and Potomac depot ...’ (He was, of course, shot: Alexander Graham Bell rigged up an electrical machine which failed to find the position of the bullet.) ‘At about the time the Roentgens were celebrating their last quiet Christmas outside the limelight in 1895, young Tolman Cunnings was losing an argument in a Canadian ...”