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“... tarpon, radiated from Jim’s wrists and ankles, ran across grass and Jim’s beautiful Japanese rock garden to the back bumpers of cars poised to travel different directions. I wanted to tell Jim that it would be over quickly, that it wouldn’t hurt. Jim Kunkel is the deposed mayor of a suburban town, and he’s being drawn and quartered by automobile. The ...”

“... rarer for a critic, whose work tends to date fast. The morbid, sexy idolatry usually reserved for rock stars, dead poets and suicide blondes is being lavished on him. The front cover of Tynan’s Letters, published in 1994, features a portrait taken by David Bailey, itself a sign of pop status. The front cover of The ...”

“... in point would be The Elephant Man (1980), a still from which appears on the cover of the book. David Lynch’s film may indeed demonstrate ‘time-worn points of view’ in some ways, and its central figure may indeed combine the stereotypes of the Sweet Innocent and the Saintly Sage (Norden is inordinately fond of categories like these and the ‘Elderly ...”

“... equally illuminating in charting their subjects’ partial successes and partial failures. Thus David Hume attacked the 18th-century myth of an ancient British constitution and warned his readers of the disastrous political consequences of ignoring their history. By reminding them of the recent emergence of constitutional government he wished to point to ...”

“... in anything approaching a full way. The Times gave it modest coverage, both through the columns of David Wood and through its reports of debates in the plenary sessions. For all practical purposes, the rest was silence.’ Something resembling silence also greeted the European Elections of 1979. These not only produced the present combative European ...”

“... Written in a deadpan, matter-of-fact style, it’s a kind of literary analogue to the indie rock of the mid-Eighties, to the music of bands like the Replacements who sang tepidly defiant sagas of generational self-pity: ‘We’re getting no place/As fast as we can.’ Moody situates a gallery of burned-out kids in the toxic environment of northern New ...”

“... David Freedberg’s new book is illustrated with wonderful, detailed drawings and engravings of plants, fungi, fossils, birds, insects and animals – nearly all made in the 17th century. Freedberg is an art historian; the starting point of his book is a dream he had sometime before 1986 in which Anthony Blunt appeared holding a drawing of an orange ...”

“... cultural reach’ evidently strained every sinew. It apparently infects the 1947 film of Brighton Rock, based on Graham Greene’s novel of 1938. With the exception of Ida’s Pierrot troupe there is little in the film to suggest any link to Victorian England. But then the ‘structure of feeling’ is a woolly conceit, almost a faith. Proof isn’t ...”

“... and pre-Holocaust past. All we needed to do to eradicate it for ever, we thought, was stage more Rock against Racism events. Shakespeare, who did not occupy a cherished place in the hearts of skinheads or NF agitators, didn’t seem central to the issue. If anything, his willingness to write the role of Othello, which despite Burbage’s original blackface ...”

“... seemed to be whatever was happening in Elvis Presley’s eyes. It was Sylvia Plath’s poetry, David Bowie’s soulful space nonsense or the truths riding in on the Jesus and Mary Chain’s guitar feedback. But by the time Dead 2Pac appeared at the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival, deep had begun to signal something netherworldly. Those ...”

“... to 1953 and is set in rural Mississippi, a landscape of baked clay and shacks with cinder yards. David, the hero-narrator, grows up an only child in redneck poverty. His shiftless father drifts from job to job, beats his wife and lets David get beaten up by young thugs his own age. The family are ostracised by respectable ...”

“... worth reading for a justification of his party that rises above ritual partisan point-scoring. If David Willetts was not already the best-known of the three when the books were commissioned, he certainly is now. Allegedly known as ‘Two Brains’ to his friends (or alleged friends, perhaps), Mr Willetts last year found himself in difficulties before a ...”

“... is reminded of Houdini as he watches a girl doing weird gyrations in the midst of the crowd at a rock festival. Studying the film of her movements that he has shot, he sees ‘someone in a straitjacket’, ‘the classic terror ... of someone straitjacketed and trying to break free’. ‘Lives of the Poets’, the novella which takes up nearly half of ...”

“... Tina. ‘Wonderful! … Where’s the library?’) At the end of 1997 Brown was replaced by David Remnick, who as an editor is less Buzz-happy than Brown, but as a writer ranges, browlessly, from Kremlin politics to Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile Seabrook lived to tell the tale, though half his chapters are revamped articles written for Brown, whom he regards ...”

“... number of survivors miraculously trickled back to England. Among them were the ship’s captain, David Cheap; his second-in-command, Robert Baynes; the chief gunner, John Bulkeley; the carpenter, John Cummins; and three young midshipmen, John Byron, Alexander Campbell and Isaac Morris. They returned home in rival groups, by different routes, telling ...”