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“... even undermining the fiction. Desperate Characters begins on a Friday afternoon in Cobble Hill, a neighbourhood of brownstone houses a few blocks from Brooklyn Heights. Otto and Sophie Bentwood are sitting down to sauteéd chicken livers and risotto Milanese. With her inventory of the couple’s willow-ware platter, Tiffany lampshade and a bookcase ...”

“... in his mid-forties when he fell in love with Senhouse. He liked to pretend that he was over the hill at 30, but the evidence suggests that he was happier in middle age than previously. The great success of Eminent Victorians made an obvious difference, as did the decision to set up house with the painter Dora Carrington. Though he could be wickedly funny ...”

“... every mirror and through every grille, were types drawn from Arthur Rackham, from Puck of Pook’s Hill, Photoplay and Comic Cuts, and dirty postcards. Even the fearsome Hispanic spooks were local villains, flashers at worst. And everywhere Burra went, with the possible exception of the North Pennines and extreme Mexico, reminded him of places in Sussex, his ...”

“... and is fond of dressing up in other people’s personalities. After the Almighty, after St Paul – for whom he confesses ‘a strange liking’ – his most influential model, or imaginative icon, is John Bunyan, whose life and work obsess him. Bunyan is ‘this dreamer and penman’, ‘the most prominent man of letters as far as English literature ...”

“... noted committed Trumpistas (Rudy Giuliani, Newt Gingrich, Chris Christie); a few party stalwarts (Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell – who was booed) taking a sip of, if not exactly drinking the Trump Kool-Aid; and a breadline of hungry ‘rising stars’, fixed on the 2020 elections, hoping to be discovered as Barack Obama was at the 2004 Democratic Convention. On ...”

“... study, that Appleyard chooses, or is compelled, to make some independent valuations. Speaking of Paul Scott, J.G. Farrell and V.S. Naipaul in relation to the death of Empire, he expresses a special enthusiasm for the last-named. Then come people for whom he has apparently no more than a cautious respect, but who are important because of their period ...”

“... admiration for the Soviet achievement is illustrated by the London Underground station of Gants Hill, a tribute to the Moscow Metro. A point about the decline of the traditional family elicits the passing observation that ‘by 1981 even Debrett’s Etiquette and Modern Manners felt it necessary to advise upper-class hostesses how to deal with “live-in ...”

“... spoke darkly about the return to a mother, and, quite plainly, about the lost paradise of Fern Hill. He drank heavily, and is popularly supposed to have died of that. He went to America, and is popularly supposed to have died of that too. The departure for a foreign country, which may be accompanied by the choice of a foreign partner, is an aspect of the ...”

“... and their book will be heavily quarried by quizmasters until the BBC itself goes the way of Snow Hill and (nearly) Marylebone. (‘What is the connection between Lordship Lane, Dulwich and Railway Cuttings, Acton?’ ‘Camille Pissarro painted the first, Lucien Pissarro the second.’) They cite no fewer than 99 films, from Jean Renoir’s version of ...”

“... Osmond when he spun the coin in the centre circle, resembled a grimacing Magwitch by half-time. Paul Mariner, a picture of pampered, hammy self-love at club level, reminded me, as he trudged from the park, of the standard, traumatically chinless mod who puts in depressingly regular appearances at South Coast magistrates’ courts after Bank Holiday ...”

“... by a hit-man in Spain in 1990 – in a rather different aura, more Gauloise than Craven A. Piers Paul Read’s The Train Robbers (1978) was another one: ‘the evil ... which I had sought in the train robbers can be found in any one of us and has little to do with the law of the land. There was both a good thief and a bad thief on Calvary and the good thief ...”

“... is ‘eight hundred feet in the air … an apartment at the top of a building at the top of a hill’. It’s the highest point in San Francisco, a fortress the size of six normal apartments, decorated in imposing marble and mirrors: All the walls were mirrored. Every vertical surface was mirrored. No architectural detail was insignificant enough to ...”

“... science fiction to his big-selling detective story Motherless Brooklyn (1999), to his Cobble Hill coming-of-age novel The Fortress of Solitude (2003) to his intricate, ironic New York Buddenbrooks, Dissident Gardens (2013). Even his prose often seems like the work of a series of distinct writers: from the Philip K. Dick/Raymond Chandler pastiche of ...”

“... story. I look at a framed text over the fireplace: Christians should endeavour, as the Apostle Paul commands them, to live peaceably with all men (Romans 12, v. 18) even with those of a different religious persuasion. Issued November, 1863 Nice touch that ‘even’, like a grudging knuckle showing. On the flagged floor I notice a crust of wheaten farl ...”

“... themselves. Monet stumbled across Daubigny painting by the Thames, who put him in touch with Paul Durand-Ruel, that ‘Napoleon of dealers’, who had led a troop of 35 crates onto foreign soil and opened a gallery on New Bond Street; Durand-Ruel told Monet where he could find Pissarro, who was staying in Norwood with his mother and ...”