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“... He denies any particular bias against Labour governments, and is sorry to have fallen out with Harold Wilson (who later expressed sadness that he hadn’t known Pincher was a fellow Yorkshireman, telling him: ‘It would have made a difference, you know’). But while it may be true that he needled Tory as well as Labour administrations, provoking ...”

“... Lucas and five of the Blake plates reproduced. The other modern edition I acquired was called The Love Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft, and had a biographical preface by Roger Ingpen. It was a reprint of Mary’s letters to her lover Gilbert Imlay, first published by Godwin among her posthumous works, and then by Kegan Paul in 1879. Ingpen wrote of her life ...”

“... recounted were haunted, not only by the shared grind of poverty, but by private images of loss and love. There was a political edge to those novels, emerging as they did from the feminist Left, but what drove them was a long engagement with moments of vision, bleakly Wordsworthian spots of time that recur again and again in her fiction. Barker’s first four ...”

“... to buy books only to discover that everything that wasn’t a copy of Jaws was by Jackie Collins, Harold Robbins, Sidney Sheldon, or Danielle Steel. I noted this cultural deficit in my compendium of things to complain about to God but I read The Bitch myself on the way home and remember a very fruity passage in which the heroine, a woman who owned a disco ...”

“... William Styron and Sainte-Beuve, is conspicuously silent about Flaubert and seems to have a love-hate relationship with Nabokov. He delights in summoning up his rhetoric of loathing for the Nazis and the Mafia and in distilling hard, frequently paradoxical conclusions from his insights. ‘Cowards are dangerous,’ he hisses in a review of Gitta ...”

“... Oprah has been wallowing in for 25 years. The two of them were made for each other, with their love of confession and ‘personal revelations’. Each, in her own lucrative way, has coarsened the public’s understanding of real pain, corrupted the meaning of self-respect and annihilated reticence, and it all keeps the tills ringing, the audiences ...”

“... closeted editorial assistant who works with him at a literary quarterly in Manhattan. Jack is in love with Will, but his ardent affection and oversized penis fail to bend Will’s heterosexuality. Jack holds out hope that Will’s novel may betray affection for him, or at least an openness to sexual experimentation. Novelists, Jack believes, are under a ...”

“... like everybody else I did my best to look as innocent as possible.’Lewis writes that Neapolitans love food more than life itself, but in 1944 this was not only true of Neapolitans. Since there was so little of it, food was the most popular topic of conversation in Rome. People no longer fitted into their clothes because they had lost so much weight; many ...”

“... subjects: the Ricketts, Woods and Gudger families. Sometimes, against his declared purpose, his love overwhelms these people with words and will not let them breathe. The self-depreciating asides (on a middle-class writer’s privilege and complicity) are only a little dated and anyway in line with expectations of this form of pastoral, but they sink the ...”

“... only with a deathless ‘ – stayed the night.’ Very occasionally he will rise to ‘we made love.’ Wyman comes across as someone who not only always checks the bill but keeps his own slate too in case there’s a dispute: ‘a girl who had stayed with me ... on tour in Denmark in June 1965 contacted the Stones office ... saying she had just given ...”

“... the progress of their romance in her diary, but when they meet, and Algernon falls instantly in love as planned, Cecily won’t let him read it: ‘Oh no. You see, it is simply a very young girl’s record of her own thoughts and impressions, and consequently meant for publication. When it appears in volume form I hope you will order a copy.’ Cecily’s ...”

“... before he shot the top of his own head off, Americans had begun to wonder whether they had come to love Hemingway not wisely but too well. This suspicion had little to do with his stories and novels: it was the fiction that Hemingway and others had made of his life that held the attention – the text of the man, not of his art. As the writer and war ...”

“... Krays are referred to in his books), by the great anti-pornography campaign or by the advent of Harold Pinter into the fold. The book ends in the mid-Sixties, just as the author, in full literary flight, has completed that excellent life of Wellington. Page one introduces us to the author’s jolly orange-haired nurse, once of the music halls, doing the ...”

“... though he undoubtedly resented her. The nearest he came was to say, no, he didn’t get his love of history from her, for in truth he got little from her at all. Even less did he criticise his father, for all that he saw a different woman on his arm each time he met him: Jack gave his father the unswerving deference Joe Kennedy assumed as his right from ...”

“... at like one: ‘Write to me soon,’ she wrote before he set off for America, ‘and tell me you love your little Page, and that one day you will come back to “him”, my Prince, my Prince.’ ‘Why can’t you dress up as a boy and come with me?’ wrote Douglas in reply. Better than that, even, was the fact that George Montagu, an old (possibly ...”