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“... many writers who were drawn to use the story in one way or another, among them Trollope, Patrick White, Robin Maugham and Julian Symons, just as Dumas, and Boublil and Schönberg, have pounced on the story of Martin Guerre, and Verlaine, Georg Trakl and Peter Handke, not to mention a dozen playwrights and film-makers, have taken up the tale of Kaspar ...”

“... sunrise and sunset, cloud over the mountains, birds on the wire: and as for the solidity of the white oxen in all this perhaps only Dr Williams (Bill Carlos) will understand its importance, its benediction. He wd/ have put in the cart. There is poetry in the white oxen (all the more, perhaps, for the cart’s ...”

“... between old (sentimental) socialism and the new (hard) left. The hero of News from Nowhere, Richard Stern, updates Caute’s earlier hero, middle-aged, middle-of-the-ideological-road Steven Bright, the fortyish academic trapped between two eras whose crack-up was portrayed in The Demonstration (1970) and The Occupation (1971). The formal advantage of ...”

“... already the author of his major works. The Foundation nonetheless took a big punt on the genius of Richard Powers, who was awarded his MacArthur in 1989, aged only 32. I haven’t checked, but he is probably the youngest novelist ever to win a fellowship. Generally unknown in 1989, and temperamentally reticent, he has lately divulged something of his personal ...”

“... the ‘basic realities’, the ‘bitter realities’, of the black ghetto, Pynchon describes white Los Angeles as ‘that creepy world full of pre-cardiac Mustang drivers who scream insults at one another only when the windows are up; of large corporations where Nice-guyship is the standing order regardless of whose executive back one may be endeavouring ...”

“... to a voluble career in television. This is the fate of Miles O’Malley, hero of Terence de Vere White’s Chat Show. Chance brings him into chat-showmanship at the age of 42 – and Miles is indeed a chancer, a shamelessly obsessive promoter of himself, accurately described by one of his few friends as ‘deeply frivolous’. His chance to shine lures him ...”

“... with acuity on Madison and Jefferson and on Jack Ruby (the assassin of Kennedy’s assassin) and Richard Nixon. He is the closest thing the New World has to a Chesterton or a Burke. Who better to reflect on the relationship of sin and power, of eros and daring, of charisma and catastrophe, than an American pilgrim whose journey has taken him from William ...”

“... the only ones hungry for these insights. The popularisation of behavioural economics was led by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein’s book Nudge (2008), which inspired the setting-up of ‘behavioural insights’ teams in governments around the world (with Cameron’s coalition government at the forefront), and has nurtured a view of policy that is attentive ...”

“... and I recognised the not-quite-extraterrestrial, dumpy, middle-aged forms of Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton panting their way up the hill. The glow was not, of course, from their outward perfection, nor their inner beauty and wisdom, but the result of years and years of attention from precision-ground lenses and high-wattage lights being focused and ...”

“... to lead public opinion – rather like Bill Clinton. Although conceived before 11 September, both Richard Carwardine and Daniel Farber’s books have at least one eye on the present. Carwardine focuses on Lincoln’s relationship to different kinds of power – political, military and moral, and the power of public opinion and religious enthusiasm in an ...”

“... it isn’t; nor is it run of the mill. It is the book which sowed the seed for John Buchan’s Richard Hannay, for Indiana Jones and James Bond, and though less slick than its successors, its anxieties and lunacies are more interesting. It isn’t suitable for children; perhaps not suitable at all.As a child Henry Rider Haggard was believed to be ...”

“... Park, Moscow and the sables let loose in the snow on Staten Island at the end – ‘black on white, black on white, and then gone’ – there are connections of cause and effect such as few crime novels have ever had to cope with. Gorky Park is a long novel because it tries to deal as fully with Moscow as Simenon’s ...”

“... copy of V.R. Lang: Poems & Plays, with a Memoir by Alison Lurie. The cover sports a black and white photograph of Lang looking soulful in a harlequin costume – a picture presumably taken during one of her performances for the Poets’ Theatre of Cambridge.Lurie’s memoir recreates the fervent excitement around the activities of this avant-garde ...”

“... sits runs from corner to corner. A grille of some sort casts a grid of shadows over her face, her white dress, the bench and the boardwalk in front of her. In photographs like this – and in others of architecture, glassware, industrial machinery, even of gymnasts, swimmers and tall trees – rhythm and symmetry are abstracted from subject matter. The ...”

“... racist society. Its ruling élite, like Argentina’s, has always believed that it lived in a white country, that the Indians had somehow been disposed of, apart from a handful who might have survived in a few distant reservations. Joan Jara’s book casts considerable light on traditional attitudes in Chile, describing how even the Chilean national ...”