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“... with its ectoplasmic T-shirts and made straight for the auditorium – or was it Valhalla, the hall of the slain?The auditorium had an emptiness that could speak to us all. One shouldn’t really, in this context, use the phrase ‘warm-up act’, but there he was in a loud shirt, Rob Green from Nottingham. He played a guitar and had enough spontaneous ...”

“... Peter Carey’s Oscar and Lucinda is a tall story, as elaborate and fantastical as any of the yarns spun by the trickster hero of his last novel Illywhacker. For one thing, it’s a family history, and we’re all of us secretly stunned by the coincidences which have resulted, against the odds, in our existence. And the narrator’s account of his great-grandfather, the Reverend Oscar Hopkins, is, by any standards, a weird one ...”

“... Kiev princes to Politburo rule, from the atrocities of the forced Europeanisation introduced by Peter the Great to Stalin’s Sovietisation, and from the Polish invasion of Moscow in the early 17th century to Moscow’s imposition of martial law on Poland in 1980, the so-called Russian soul has swung between enlightenment and barbarism, humanism and ...”

“... It’s kneeing, nutting, nipple-twisting stuff: a punk version of the traditional music-hall chastisement. Coyote operates a similar trick with the famous gooseberry joke, which is: ‘What’s round and hairy and goes up and down?’ ‘A gooseberry in a lift.’ Adrian Dangerous doesn’t get it. ‘How did a gooseberry get in a lift?’ he wants ...”

“... Then in Leviathan, published some years later, Auster uses the same initials for the narrator, Peter Aaron; and anagrammatic sleight of hand (Delia/Lydia, Iris/Siri: Auster’s real-life loves past and present) further blurs the boundaries between his facts and his fictions. So one approaches his openly autobiographical Hand to Mouth with ...”

“... why Lord and Lady Wilde paid those school fees. Merlin Holland’s essay on his grandfather in Peter Raby’s Cambridge Companion to Oscar Wilde illuminates these appropriations by charting a series of significant errors through multiple versions of Wilde’s history. Holland takes us back to one of the most familiar scenes from the life of Wilde: the bad ...”

“... screen; they seem tired and bloated, older than Hollywood would allow. The suspect known as ‘Peter’ (an operative travelling under the name Peter Elvinger, ostensibly a French national), comes off as nerdy, nervous. The suspect known as ‘Kevin’ (Kevin Daveron, ‘Irish’) is a bland executive, a ...”

“... brown hatter’. But in his third novel, Pompes Funèbres, written in 1947, the oppostions are, as Peter Coe points out in his excellent 1968 study of Genet, beginning to show worrying signs of being out of control. In Pompes Funèbres we are offered Hitler as Saviour, Nazi officer Erik Seiler as love object and an ecstasy of moaning over the ravishing of la ...”

“... at the Floral Theatre, Bridlington, and afterwards served her apprenticeship in old-time Music Hall, in the traditional routine of summer season and winter pantomime. Theatre managers got value for their money when they booked Beryl. She could sing and dance and slapstick, all at the same time. When war broke out, she was requisitioned by ENSA, later ...”

“... As spectators we seem to have changed quite a bit in recent times. At the opera or in the concert-hall there is nowadays, as never before so generally, an obligatory baying as the last note sounds; it is indeed becoming a competition, the first yell winning, as in Bingo. The winner is displaying the intensity of his appreciation but also as nearly as makes ...”

“... like Edward Dmytryk, Joris Ivens, Wolfgaang Staudte or Fred Zinnemann; younger directors like Peter Bogdanovich, Sergei Bondarchuk, Volker Schlöndorff or Andrzej Wajda? Why should Samuel Fuller rate more than twice as much space as Vittorio De Sica? Ah, says Roud, ‘the crash of De Sica’s reputation over the past decade has been the loudest of any ...”

“... career at Balliol College, Oxford of Uncle Arnold, after whom not only his nephew but Toynbee Hall in the East End of London were posthumously named. Carrying the name Arnold Toynbee was a double-edged privilege, as the behaviour of the family testifies; when the young author published his first book under this style, he was reprimanded for appropriating ...”

“... Miss Smithson’ – a black veil with wisps of straw tastefully interwoven amongst the hair. As Peter Raby puts it, in a biography which for the first time gives her side of the story, ‘the conjunction of beauty, forlorn love, madness and premature death’ was irresistible to the French. Through her, Shakespeare suddenly became a central part of French ...”

“... smiling tolerance among his menaces of damnation’. Recent writing on the English Reformation by Peter Lake, Nicholas Tyacke and others has exploded Eliot’s account of Andrewes as the voice of a tranquil via media, a man whose confidence sprang from the settled possession of ‘a formed visible church behind him’. His early religious opinions took shape ...”

“... not least on the Barclays’ home turf of West London, where the slumlord turned property mogul Peter Rachman was making his fortune. The brothers set up an estate agency in Notting Hill. One day a woman came in looking to move to a particular street in the neighbourhood so that she could be near her elderly father. Frederick showed her a small house on the ...”