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“... a million miniature resentments and hassles, only to land the reader, again and again, very far short of the novelist’s great capacities. He’s not even a Herzog, stewing in his own deepness, but a whiner, itching and scratching with agitation. He blames. And like Henderson he needs, he wants, he demands. All of this is fine in a person, and almost ...”

“... she had to’. By this point, if not before, it’s clear that Ezra bears a strong resemblance to Philip Roth. The week Asymmetry was published, Halliday, in a very Roth-like two-step, gave an interview to the New York Times in which she revealed that she had met and dated Roth when she was an assistant at the Wylie Agency in her twenties and defended herself ...”

“... Political diaries are the raw material of both biography and history. Philip Williams, who has already quarried Gaitskell’s diary for his own massive biography, is not likely to have found significant new material in subsequently editing it for publication, or to have gained new insights. If he has, he has not drawn attention to them ...”

“... her scatterbrained promiscuity and her early life. The other story is about a neurologist called Philip Wild, a man of a certain age and an even more certain obesity. He writes in the first person of what he calls ‘the art of self-slaughter’, not suicide but a form of mental magic, in which he makes his unloved body disappear bit by bit, only to ...”

“... As the years ticked by England became more and more isolated diplomatically. A cold war with Philip II of Spain had turned by the 1580s into military intervention in the Low Countries and France, and war at sea. With her rival claim to the Tudor throne, Mary Queen of Scots made Elizabeth’s refusal either to marry or to name a successor the most ...”

“... to conceal the truth about serious and repeated sexual harassment, racist abuse and bullying’, Philip Green gave a self-congratulatory interview to the Guardian. Swaggering through his high-street stores, journalist in tow, he showed off his knowledge of the stock, his attention to product display, his grace while accepting customers’ compliments, and ...”

“... sir.’ His debt to Irish modernism is made literal in an otherwise not particularly successful short story set in Ireland (Johnson’s native terrain was London) called ‘Broad Thoughts from a Home’. This prefixes a description of O’Meara’s Bar in Dublin with a spoof invoice from ‘Kenny and Knight, Fact-finders to Literary Ladies and ...”

“... Wife’ – but the most singular and most effective poem in the whole collection is a parody of Philip Larkin’s ‘The Whitsun Weddings’ called ‘The Larkin Automatic Car Wash’. Like all good parodies, it is not only an act of homage but a precision instrument revealing the full capabilities and depth of its subject. For one thing, it shows how ...”

“... a review of J.F.C. Harrison’s book on millenarianism, the last, in May this year, a review of Philip Pullman’s The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ. ‘Eloquently’: was that the right word? Not really. Frank’s writing was so much more exact, more stylish, more patient, more ironic, more playful, more attentive, more cunning, more cagey than ...”

“... cause – I felt both proud and humbled that a 67-year wrong has finally been righted.’ A few short paragraphs later he reminds us: ‘I made a £1 million commitment to the £7 million appeal because I wanted the memorial to be built while some Bomber Command veterans, now in their late eighties and early nineties, are still alive.’ And, lest we ...”

“... like the title of a historic event like the Boston Tea Party or the Relief of Mafeking. Within a short time the breach had become a flood. The phenomenon of Abstract Expressionism, New York Painting – whatever one wants to call it – gathered momentum at an extraordinary speed and within ten years the old stockade existed only as a sentimental memory, its ...”

“... Just before the violent climax of Patrick McCabe’s novel The Butcher Boy, there’s a short sequence in which the damaged, dangerous young narrator, Francie Brady, pays a visit to the seaside town where his parents spent their honeymoon. His mother and father have been dead for some time – victims of suicide and drink, respectively – and Francie’s happy memories of them are pitifully scarce ...”

“... this stuff and roaring with larffter since i was 11 yrs old’ (which, if nothing else, endorses Philip Hensher’s assertion in the introduction to this edition that those who attempt to imitate Molesworth’s style always ‘come a cropper’). Hensher, too, at ‘inexplicable moments’, has had to ‘lay down Down with Skool! and cry with ...”

“... his operator, preferring to leave it to be decided between him and the director. Almendros has a short answer to that: ‘A director of photography who thinks only about lighting, without taking the responsibility for framing, is not working seriously.’ No such problems of course with Truffaut or Rohmer, for whom he shot The Marquise of O –‘probably my ...”

“... giving her female genitals while bestowing a penis on her effeminate husband. Gender fluidity, in short, was well recognised, and though many writers deplored it, some were proud to claim identities that would now be called non-binary.Much of the book draws on Betancourt’s expertise as an art historian. His first chapter is a study of the Annunciation in ...”