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“... understand quickly that Tokyo Year Zero concerns a real-life serial killer, as notorious there as Peter Sutcliffe here, but to non-Japanese, the novel seems to introduce us to a conventionally anti-heroic modern fictional detective, hunting a murderer of young women. Will the policeman track him down before he kills again? Stepping out in the over-eager ...”

“... and the present owner, dated 1999, and a letter and note to Laukamp from an Egyptologist called Peter Munro at the Free University of Berlin, dated 1982, conveying an analysis of the contents of the papyri by a colleague of his, Professor Fecht. That was all.While lamenting the meagreness of the provenance materials, King was reluctant to discuss the ...”

“... characters it is the Italians, it seems, who always take centre-stage. They emerge as the Peter Mandelsons of the olive world, able to sell everything but themselves, bad-mouthed for bad-mouthing rivals, while buying up the cream of their crop and selling it as their own. They may grow fewer olives than the Spaniards, but they have cultivated ...”

“... even lowering the lane outside his house to protect himself from view. It’s a subject that James Moore has made particularly his own, providing the definitive account of Darwin’s fears, phobias and life options in his lynchpin essay in The Darwinian Heritage. The Darwinian Heritage is a richly-detailed volume, daunting in size. It contains 31 ...”

“... reading matter, the titles she was happy to display. Alan Bennett’s Diaries and, of course, Peter Ackroyd’s gold-brick biography of Blake. Bennett, Ackroyd and Jonathan Miller – these were the figures who mattered most. The Christmas parcels of English literature. Enough of threadbare bohemia, paranoid narcissism, chemical tourism through the Third ...”

“... Robert Montgomery during Chandler’s lifetime, and afterwards by Elliot Gould, Robert Mitchum and James Garner. He was the hero of the most listened to radio detective serial in history, and, by the time Chandler died in 1959, had sold over five million books. The private eye was the wilderness hero moved to the urban frontier, alone and unattached, living ...”

“... and egalitarian refusal to be impressed. But since our only national cult is the Royal Family, James Agate’s less flattering verdict may also be more appropriate: ‘The English instinctively admire any man who has no talent and is modest about it.’ Other nations’ great men, however, are a different matter. Perhaps because Napoleon was born on one ...”

“... They have hung there since 1756, when the bishop of Durham acquired them from the estate of James Mendez, a Jewish merchant of Portuguese descent. Mendez bought them from William Chapman in 1720, just after the collapse of the South Sea Company, in which Chapman was a shareholder. How and when the paintings arrived in Britain isn’t known, but by the ...”

“... caused an outburst of public indignation in Britain. When it emerged that the Home Secretary, Sir James Graham, had authorised the opening of Mazzini’s correspondence, he was attacked in Parliament for resorting to ‘the spy system of foreign states’ and Carlyle wrote to the Times that opening of men’s letters was ‘a practice near of kin to picking ...”

“... and Kay, Barroll and de Grazia and Razzell all made me think again about a life I thought I knew. Peter Razzell’s is the slightest of these three books, but it makes two important contributions to any reading of William Shakespeare’s life in Stratford. First, it places the career of William’s father John in the larger contexts of Stratford’s economic ...”

“... A famous passage in Henry James’s Life of Nathaniel Hawthorne laments the absence for the writer in America of every relation and institution which made writing socially viable – an army and a navy and a church and a court, and classes and village squires and evening parties. James’s view of the materials available to the writer may strike us today as somewhat old-fashioned and unenterprising, but there is a basic shrewdness in what he says ...”

“... just a touch, her left leg braced under a sidling hip.The celebrity appearances by Adam and Saints James, John (Evangelist) and Peter take the form of little soul-flames, like the others, distinguished only by the tags inscribed beside them. The couple converse and pass on. We see the last of them as they rise through the ...”

“... theoretical edge of human thought. Regis can even explain the quality of an excitement like this. James Gleick’s Chaos tells an exhilarating tale. It starts a quarter of a century ago with work on weather forecasting by Edward Lorenz and finishes with an account of the penetration of ‘chaos’ research into sciences as different as epidemiology and ...”

“... one. Lawrence Lever’s book on the Barlow Clowes affair combines biography and City journalism. Peter Clowes must be at least faintly charismatic to have convinced so many people of his ability and rectitude, but Lever fails to convey this. On the other hand, had he tried, he would have been undermined by the photographs in the book: saying that Clowes ...”

“... people had their roots in the working classes, and were denying their own people just as St Peter did to Jesus.’ Generally, Mars-Jones’s prose is exceptionally nimble, dry, humorously restrained, very English, with a little Nabokovian velvet too. He can describe more or less anything and make it interesting. This description of John’s mother ...”