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“... exercise), and the clues he offers come right at the end of the book, by which time, to be frank, our interest in the question has flagged. Brought up in the comfortable affluence of his family hotel, showered with love and gifts, and urged on (but not unpleasantly) by his parents’ vicarious hopes, he grew up a ‘crown prince’. Graduates of the ...”

“... notions, then whirling round them in a violent ritualistic dance until he could celebrate Frank Harris as another Shakespeare, James Stephens as greater than Milton, Dostoevsky and D.H. Lawrence as of the same order as Christ: and only a little above the lot of them, in ‘her rightful place’, Katherine Mansfield. There he could love her. Antony ...”

“... turnstiles to get in for free; that of Russ Hodges, a radio commentator; those of J. Edgar Hoover, Frank Sinatra and Jackie Gleason who have arrived together. Gleason is playing hookey from a rehearsal for The Honeymooners , has been drinking hooch and stuffing himself with junk food, and is sick on Sinatra’s shoes at the climactic moment of the game. Hoover ...”

“... other than alive. The trick was to distinguish appealing and enabling myths from noxious ones. Frank Kermode, in The Sense of an Ending, written before Kermode came across Barthes, I think, but nevertheless a book that seems to have Barthes in mind, to be waiting for him, thought an attention to the difference between myth and fiction might do some of this ...”

“... skulduggery, scams and religions, ditto. Dirt-poor, barefoot, backwoods Florida (the subject of Frank Conroy’s memoir of the 1930s and 1940s, Stop-Time) is not all that long gone. Sweet tea, squirrel and grits Florida. Then, successively, railroads, oranges, real estate, wintering place, destination for domestic and foreign tourism, and retirement ...”

“... to it, and the energy of illusions. But How I Grew leaves us on the cold hillside. It is, to be frank, more than a little boring, like having tea with an elderly lady who holds you with her glittering eye while going on and on about her misspent youth. Boasting about it, in fact – but in a mumbling sort of way, dense with references to Maddies and Dotties ...”

“... was equal parts Old Hollywood and Brancusi mask, Lisa Marie was famous for her relationships with Michael Jackson and Nicolas Cage – and for being Elvis’s daughter. Before her death, in 2023, of cardiac arrest caused by complications from weight-loss surgery, she had been recording tapes of material for a memoir. These recordings form the basis of From ...”

“... architectural band of six men – Peter Cook, Warren Chalk, Ron Herron, Dennis Crompton, Michael Webb and David Greene – whose day jobs were with big commercial practices and local authorities. They formed in the early 1960s and over the next decade or so produced thousands of designs for ‘cities of the future’ that were highly ...”

“... Lilac Princess at school, millionaire biographer of Jacqueline Onassis, Elizabeth Taylor and Frank Sinatra, looks not all that different from her current subject. There is the same bright, taut face which a good surgical lift always ensures, the same immaculately-dyed and coiffeured hair, the same fixed smile exhibiting the kind of teeth that only an ...”

“... imply anything, while seeming merely to pass the time of day.This is the sound of the bluesman Frank Hutchison, to whom Bob Dylan would return in 1993 for the version of ‘Stack A Lee’ (‘a romance tale without the cupidity,’ Dylan wrote) he offered on World Gone Wrong; it is the sound of drugstore speech in Hibbing, Minnesota, in 1949; it’s the ...”

“... an ‘Age of Boswell’ to the 20th century. This second volume of the grand Frederick Pottle-Frank Brady biography marks the climax of that long achievement. Climax, but not end: in some country-house loft or uncleared bank vault, I would bet, lies the huge bundle which is the missing Johnson-Boswell correspondence. But that discovery, if and when it ...”

“... as far as it would go with Christopher and His Kind, a memoir of his prewar life – ‘as frank and factual as I can make it’ – and attained heroic stature among the newly militant gay community, particularly strong on the West Coast of America. In the Huntington’s otherwise extensive press release there was no reference to Isherwood’s being ...”

“... of civic discourse, posters appeared out of nowhere with the head of a man who wasn’t quite Frank Dobson. There was nothing peevish or pop-eyed about this citizen. The shirt was open-necked. The tilted look was watchful, eyes narrowed against bright light: a non-combatant shocked to find himself exposed on the hustings. No Londoner, according to the ...”

“... own landlord in Manchester in the Sixties and on a well-known painter whom some have identified as Frank Auerbach. Having arrived in Manchester as a research student, Sebald chances on Ferber’s studio during one of his long, solitary, weekend walks around the city’s soot-blackened ruins, the haunted mansions of its industrial past. The artist’s method is ...”

“... other people first – in the years since the war than actually died in battle. In Dispatches, Michael Herr describes meeting an ocean-eyed Lurp (a former member of a Long Range Patrol) who, between tours, would stick a hunting rifle out of the window of his parents’ home and draw aim on passing cars and people: ‘It used to put my folks real ...”