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“... correspondence. Both have great collective charm, giving the effect of looking through the glass into a well-matured aquarium. ‘American literary culture’ seems far-off, sweetly homogeneous, infinitely attractive, whether mirrored in the Dial, edited by Marianne Moore from 1921 to 1929, or in what now seems that cosy world of forty years ...”

“... poetry. Or more accurately, his life has no adhesive surfaces. He’s like a man trying to climb a glass wall with a large comforting mattress underneath him. His family have assimilated into bland ethnic nothingness. He belongs nowhere, and inherits no faith, only vague decency and gaping intellectual open-mindedness. There is no worthwhile literary or sexual ...”

“... of his wives, ran for mayor, made movies, taunted feminists, advocated street crime and graffiti. Glass in hand, Capote was photographed with every shipping tycoon and movie star of his era. They were competing with Hollywood, and they knew it. And they were competing with the previous generation. The giant legend of Hemingway, for all the holes that would be ...”

“... says David Hughes, quoting William Plomer; Hermione Gingold’s voice was ‘like powdered glass in deep syrup’, says Ned Sherrin, quoting J.C. Trewin. Scruffiness attracts comment: Tom Sargant, of Justice, was a shabby eagle. As always, there are many with whom one would not wish to share a dinner table, never mind a ...”

“... meticulous visual detail to these scenes, setting the story against an alternating backdrop of glass houses and dark woods.) Of course, Moody’s distressed, privileged world is not exempt from outside forces. As the book proceeds, it develops a somewhat strained analogy between the ‘unfaithfulness’ of leaders like Nixon and the casual wife-swapping of ...”

“... Worde would have looked out at the cistern house of the Fleet River; on a weekday morning now, the glass and chrome of Shoe Lane is full of suited twentysomethings. A few minutes’ walk up Fleet Street brings you to Number 188, to the west of St Dunstan’s Church, opposite Ye Olde Cock Tavern, and in an echo of Peter Blayney’s central themes (the business ...”

“... Looking at the list of poets was like having one’s Irish nose pushed up against the polished glass of a posh window in some imaginary Big House. But it was clear to me that there was one poet included in both these anthologies who really meant business. His name, like his poems, had a wilful, manufactured look. (He had, in fact, changed it by deed poll ...”

“... and started to smash the place up. The comrades escaped across the rooftops, Jim falling through a glass roof, his left leg scarred for life as ‘proof’ of this adventure. Perhaps it was a tall tale, not untouched by blarney. In the 1960s the BBC series One Pair of Eyes devoted a programme to Claud Cockburn. There is a sequence in which Claud and Jim stroll ...”

“... one of his periodic financial panics, was to deny his thirsty parent, when he came to call, the glass of sherry he craved but was too shy and too mannerly to ask for. Mother retired to South Africa, where she formed a relationship which excluded her husband, though she retained a rather scatterbrained affection for Cyril. One of the mature Cyril’s many ...”

“... was only a movie. The Philadelphia Story was written specifically for and partly about her by Philip Barry. It had a two-year run on Broadway, and (since Howard Hughes had bought her the rights) she starred in the film version for MGM. Quite apart from the life it portrayed, for a time The Philadelphia Story was her life. Many scripts were written with ...”

“... knowing winks from the participants in a forgery: at the first performance of Vortigern, John Philip Kemble in the title role hammed up the line ‘And when this solemn mockery is o’er’, and repeated it several times, to titters from his audience. Phillips’s game is to create a Shakespearean feel, then give you a false note, then offer multiple ...”

“... in the Crusades used the communications technology of the day. Public sermons, hymns, stained glass and identifying tattoos could excite and motivate, and the potentially crusading public was groomed as surely as impressionable modern teenagers absorbed in radical websites. We will be less bewildered by Islamic State and its success so far if we ...”

“... is that ‘writing is never spontaneous.’ So too, as he pointed out in an interview with Philip Roth, the truth told in The Truce is ‘filtered truth’, each episode having been ‘preceded by countless verbal versions’ and retouchings as it was recounted by Levi to his friends and family. Levi’s writing about the Holocaust and its ...”

“... Aesop was painted most likely in the late 1630s, as part of the decor of the Torre de la Parada, Philip IV’s hunting lodge outside Madrid. It would be good to know something of its original place in the building, or at least be sure that the Torre was its first destination, but as usual with Velázquez the court records are mute. (Even Las Meninas is a ...”

“... dynastic portraits need big houses. Both need a deferential cast of mind. When, in the Sixties, Philip Johnson built an underground art bunker close by his famous glass house in New Canaan, he dramatised the division which had grown up between the collecting of art and the embellishment of rooms. Art, driven out by ...”