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“... the mid-1950s, Hampstead was Tonks’s stamping ground. She lived with her husband on Downshire Hill, where she hosted dinner parties, ‘hobnobbed’ with the then septuagenarian Edith Sitwell (a neighbour), and held court at a local café with Elias Canetti. A profile in the Guardian in 1970 reports her turning up in a purple trouser suit and a white ...”

“... I arrived I was crossing the Plaça de Sant Jaume when I bumped into Bernard Loughlin’s brother Michael, who had recently arrived in Barcelona to work as an engineer. He and the woman who would later become his girlfriend had found a magnificent flat near the Picasso Museum in the old city. Soon I moved in. I love other people’s lives. That summer we went ...”

“... Very few Anglo-Saxons had access to enough books to warrant even a bookshelf. As Michael Lapidge tells us, they kept their ‘libraries’ in boxes, and when an Anglo-Saxon scholar ‘wished to consult a book, he got down on his hands and knees and rummaged round in the chest until he came upon the book he required’. Neither the boxes nor ...”

“... also describes less bookish figures. There is his sketch, for instance, of the odd career of Michael de Freitas, aka Michael X, one of the great London rogues of the 1960s. After profiting as one of Rachman’s rent-collectors in the 1950s, he became a West London drugs baron and then, under his new name, head of the ...”

“... strangely devoid of any personal note, while Dorothy’s could only have been written by her. Alan Hill, who is editing the new complete edition of William’s and Dorothy’s letters, has made a selection of her letters that reads like a narrative, and follows her from the dependent state as orphan with the Cooksons at Penrith to the premature onset of senile ...”

“... should not calumniate the unnamed, or incite parlour-game guesswork about poetry. (Is it Geoffrey Hill? Fifteen sonnets doesn’t fit, though there would be something boldly winsome about offering Hill as your example of the poet insufficiently dedicated to his art.) Even more important, there is the assertive naivety which ...”

“... adapted traditional remedies: in China, public sweat baths, opium and herbal extracts; in India, hill tribes moulded figures out of flour and water, and waved them over the sick. In New Jersey William Carlos Williams, working as a family physician, wrote: ‘We doctors were making up to sixty calls a day. Several of us were knocked out, one of the younger of ...”

“... slums in England, or that the slums would be where they had to live. Johnson was enrolled in Tulse Hill School, a large comprehensive for boys. Despite having excellent grades, he was put in the lowest educational stream, a fate common to immigrant children. He describes it as one of his earliest experiences of institutional racism.Johnson’s adolescence ...”

“... they both committed suicide, Carla in 1910, Julia in 1927, just as two of Mann’s sons, Klaus and Michael, would commit suicide.) ‘At an early age,’ Katia Mann wrote of her mother-in-law, ‘the foreign girl married Senator or Consul Heinrich Mann. She had definite artistic talents, played the piano quite nicely and sang. My husband learned the entire ...”

“... the Fabians (a decision they were later to regret) only after hot, breathless bicycled pursuit up hill and down dale. So, Britain argues, the reason they readily accepted Wells’s later merciless and influential lampoon of themselves in The New Machiavelli, as people devoid of taste and in love with ugliness, was not because they were philistines but because ...”

“... not have to be a corpse (‘I’m asleep, you say, possibly dead’) and also indicates a debt to Michael Longley, who wrote a similar poem about Lowry’s painting. Whereas the vertical man was supposed to carry out dynamic acts of construction, the horizontal man is open to sober acts of reconstruction and it is the latter category which dominates A Word ...”

“... bonanza. The soft-spoken Californian rodent was attended by his sleepover pal and minder, Michael Jackson. We have heard it stated, quite accurately, that construction work on the Olympic Park has been carried out with few casualties. But cycle deaths are mounting, from the early casualties of the fresh-painted lanes at the base of the Bow ...”

“... still quiet – a far cry from its days as a fruit and flower nexus. I read in the Observer that Michael Caine’s father had worked in one of the London markets. Now the Market – like Caine – is gentrified, no stalls, shops or clientele operating much before 11 a.m. The figures, when we spread them out on our desk, are still below profitability, but ...”

“... voyeurism than Surrealism. The titles emphasise the link to cinema: The Haunted Bathroom, Campden Hill shows a heavily made-up woman baring her breasts, while The Policeman’s Daughter, Hampstead shows a young woman sitting naked in an upright wooden chair, half turned towards us. A bright light illuminates her body, throwing dark shadows across the ...”

“... slept late that morning. ‘Sally over there,’ one of them said, ‘was on the phone with McGraw-Hill.’ One of my tasks before I quit to go into magazines was to rewrite Macbeth and Romeo and Juliet for editions that presented Shakespeare’s text opposite my easy-to-read prose ‘translations’. The books apparently sold well, but I wasn’t entitled to ...”