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“... profile for the work entrusted to him, he cannot properly edit. One of Gaskell’s case-studies is David Copperfield. To establish the text of this novel, the well-intentioned editor must survey the number plans and MS (which, thanks to Forster, survive); the proofs which Dickens corrected for the first serialised-in-monthly-numbers issue, put out by Bradbury ...”

“... itself, or on its musical realisation, or even on the performers, but on what Ruth Berghaus or David Alden or Andrei Serban is saying about it. Or rather what images they are inflicting upon it – for the production of opera is primarily a matter of what something is made to look like. Singers rarely have any authentic acting ability and the wiser ...”

“... aunt. The most important effect was to create a very close bond between Christina and her father, David; but then David Stead remarried. There was a stepmother, and soon a brood of half-brothers and sisters, which grew to number five. Christina felt the gap open between her and the man who had been mother and father; and at ...”

“... Now King David was old and stricken in years; and they covered him with clothes, but he gat no heat. Wherefore his servants said unto him, Let there be sought for my lord the king a young virgin: and let her stand before the king, and let her cherish him, and let her lie in thy bosom, that my lord the king may get heat ...”

“... to an Evening Standard reporter who wanted to interview me and get a photograph. He’d been quite nice about it and gone away, but when I come out the photographer is still hanging about and asks me to pose with my bike. I say no, whereupon he starts snapping regardless. Even as I cycle off down Regent’s Park Road he runs after me snapping away. Why? On ...”

“... make of his sailors, like the one who leans on a table spread with good things in Elizabeth David’s Book of Mediterranean Food. The housewives doubtless thought they were nice lads; in life and art the physical types which attracted Minton were butch. The boys in Hockney’s Cavafy illustrations would not have ...”

“... One of the strongest and strangest moments in David Lynch’s unsettling TV serial Twin Peaks, part of the dream of wholesome investigating agent Dale Cooper, comes when he is kissed full on the mouth by the figure of Laura Palmer, who was a ‘wild girl’ but is now dead and whose murderer he has come to town to detect ...”

“... fail to maintain her pretence of leadership. Neil Kinnock may, despite himself, take over. David Owen may come out of his increasingly conservative camouflage to capture that middle ground on which success in British politics has been said, with decreasing plausibility, to rest. None, however, has a politically able team behind them. Almost anything ...”

“... you like anything to drink?’ ‘How terribly kind.’ ‘It’s a nice day, isn’t it?’ ‘Oh, yes, absolutely splendid.’ All of life, it seemed, could turn into a performance piece, as it seemed to be for Duchamp when he decided to stay in the Green Hotel in Pasadena in 1963, which was seen as an allusion to his much ...”

“... possessions, and take their place around a world-wide camp-fire of kith and kin. There was a nice touch of ambiguity about the non-British communities involved: like the Boers, they were to consent freely on pain of the big stick. But Amery was dazzled by the grandeur of the scheme. A shutter came down in his mind and he was to remain possessed by ...”

“... wit, yet he considered jokes risky because they easily gave offence: ‘The right management of so nice and ticklish a business, wherein a little slip may spoil all, is not everyone’s talent.’ Just as bad were ‘frothy light discourses’ and ‘misbecoming wit’ about religious matters. In the 1670s and 1680s Locke supervised the education of Anthony ...”

“... Warburg reissued his Orchid Trilogy as a single volume, with an introduction by Powell, and it is nice to see this trilogy now reprinted as a Penguin Classic. For his work is oddly appealing, and it is worth probing why. The form, as he invented it in his first book, The Military Orchid (1948), and exploited further in A Mine of Serpents and The Goose ...”

“... of the Hampton Jitney. The novel’s frequent name-checks of branded luxury goods made a nice fit for the advertisers in the New York Times Magazine, in whose pages The Lemur was first published serially earlier this year. Glass, however, has never felt at ease in this environment, or so he tells himself. He has had some time to get used to it, but ...”

“... violence and filth of life at sea and of a richly imagined mid-19th-century New York. When a ‘nice little fag’ passes an orange to him in the brig, McGlue enjoys its rotten sourness, ‘puking fruit into a bucket already half full of blackie piss and shit’. But gradually we become aware of McGlue’s humanity: his grim past (abusive mother, weak ...”

“... know on our behalf and pass the information on in such a way that we can absorb it. Well, it’s a nice idea. But reports on the wandering womb, the dangers of masturbation, relative racial brain size, cold fusion, food safety, weapons of mass destruction, the death of the author, suggest that it’s a hit and miss sort of strategy for getting an accurate ...”