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“... years: there’s an intriguing, speculative account of the Thesmophoria, for example, by Barbara Smith in the current issue of Baetyl. (This new journal coincidentally takes its name from the black stone into which the goddess Cybele metamorphosed in order to escape Zeus on one of his rampages – more flesh and stone in opposition.) Sennett follows the ...”

“... with her own self, or non-self, as a male dream preserve, the woman’s refuge might be, as St Paul said, in silence. And, ironically, it is the most ‘sensitive’ males who could be, in this context, the most exasperating. Feminism is surely right to be particularly resentful of male attempts to create, in however full a degree of sympathy, the ...”

“... led to a deterioration of standards. This is the farce of the Open Prime Ministerial Question. As Paul Johnson’s Oxford Book of Political Anecdotes* reminds us, the House of Commons has always been a loud, ribald and unruly place. But what I am talking about here is a new development. The net result of the present set-up at 3.15 pm on Tuesdays and Thursdays ...”

“... to make it into the coffee bar without further incident. It was a good crowd in Norwich, though. Paul, a soft-spoken Geordie, who drove us to every Guinness-drinking contest in Norfolk in a three-wheeled car built for war veterans crippled while fleeing Dunkirk; Guy Taylor-Smith, whose wild-man beard and icicle eyes scared ...”

“... music has also stormed the citadel of literary fiction, and characters in novels such as Karline Smith’s Moss Side Massive and Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity are identified, and minutely differentiated, by their music tastes. The characters in The Black Album tend not to be pinned down by their music tastes. Chili, the central character’s brother, is, in ...”

“... of the companies receiving this cash had no experience in sourcing or providing medical supplies. Paul Wexler, an ex-telemarketer, had never worked in medical logistics, but he did have multiple previous accusations of fraud to his name. He set up Fillakit and signed a contract with the Federal Emergency Management Agency to provide more than three million ...”

“... of his major critical successes, Birthright and Body and Soul – the latter provided the young Paul Robeson with his first movie role, following his star appearance in Eugene O’Neill’s Emperor Jones. Nevertheless, the self-taught Micheaux seems to have lacked a certain artistic credibility. When Body and Soul opened in New York, the city’s leading ...”

“... just as I’m sure we’d seen him in the cinema when he was the Gestapo chief in Pimpernel Smith and, if it was in the late 1940s we would have seen him as Mr Bumble in Oliver Twist and Jaggers in Great Expectations. It was Francis L. Sullivan, whose huge bulk must have been gracing the stage of the Grand that week, though we did not know it, thinking ...”

“... early poems were noticed. William Wootten, in The Alvarez Generation (2015), quotes Edward Lucie-Smith: ‘We Oxford poets had an inferiority complex about our Cambridge contemporaries. The chief cause was Thom Gunn. Though his first collection, Fighting Terms, did not appear until 1954, the poems Gunn was publishing in magazines were already much ...”

“... hardback publication), while cultivating a stockade in deepest Gloucestershire. With what the poet Paul Holman very perceptively describes as ‘the genuine pulp writer’s trance’, Allen’s cutups of tabloid scare stories did achieve moments of prophetic vision. The shamamstic fireplay of a consciousness at the end of its tether, written out. His ...”

“... bonds of good fellowship in the Westminster-Fleet Street nexus were confirmed by the reception of Paul Routledge’s very unauthorised biography of Peter Mandelson, the Labour Member for Hartlepool who would like to be prime minister. Routledge, an Old Labour hack, set out with an apparently impossible ambition – to do a service to the Labour movement by ...”

“... and last words in the book come from Mick Jagger and Keith Richards and those on the jacket from Paul McCartney, so that Fraser is effectively handed over to showbiz. In reality, showbiz was in the margin of his life. He was a creative figure in the art world whose motivation for dealing was neither profit nor fame but a fascination with art and artists and ...”

“... it contained little that was not in Jerome’s My Life and Times, his novelised autobiography Paul Kelver, or his essays. Sir James Barrie, a friend of Jerome, was asked for recollections and said that everything relevant was in My Life and Times. Others apparently took a similar view. They could have been conspiring to conceal something, or they could ...”

“... Mrs Morel in Sons and Lovers – is rather more efficiently handled but is still far from expert. Paul overdoses his mother’s milk with her whole prescription of morphia tablets, which he and his sister have pulverised. Mrs Morel evidently guesses why her night-time drink is so bitter, but drinks nevertheless. This is in line with the drill laid down in ...”

“... Bordoni:Which life is for meThe peaceful or the stormy?Which is the right manWalt Whitman or Paul Whiteman?Given the options of gay or straight, tempestuous or dependable, cruising or monogamous, Porter tended to chose both. He married Linda in 1919; they soon became ‘Les coleporteurs’, star turns on the Continental social merry-go-round. The ...”