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“... on the martyr’s role: ‘I have a death-thing, I know ...’ he told his official biographer Robert Shelton in one of his more revealing interviews, as if confiding to an apostle. The concerts themselves often turned into furious confrontations between performers and audience, with disgruntled folk-music lovers heckling throughout the rock ‘n’ roll ...”

“... and don’t get anywhere within hailing distance of Jenkins Ear. The date is significant: Robert Walpole had died in 1745, and a year later his son’s arrested political development brings him back to the quarrels of a previous generation. Many people are liberated by the death of a dominant parent: Horace felt the full burden of his past only when ...”

“... Film Festival in 1962) and screenwriter: his credits include Downhill Racer (1969), starring Robert Redford as a champion skier. His novel about mountaineering, Solo Faces (1979), started life as a script for Redford. As well as subsidising some unprofitable novels, the movie business brought Salter into contact with a more hedonistic world: he spent ...”

“... from the minute particulars of these chipped effigies, to release deep-stored energy from cold stone. Alan Bennett has perfected another form of autobiography, the pre-posthumous diary; the present moment written backwards. The inconveniences of an insider/outsider, eavesdropping on his own sensibility. A Crabb Robinson without a Blake. A diarist reluctant ...”

“... regarded this as its best effort was widely thought to be embarrassing. As the movie’s director Robert Zemeckis gave his speech of acceptance (which he did, excruciatingly, by speaking ‘on behalf of Forrest Gumps everywhere’), the girl seated next to Madonna, in the words of my colleague Frank DiGiacomo, ‘turned to the pop star and displayed the ...”

“... agenda as by ignorant voyeurs? Against such an opera buffa background of claim and counter-claim, Robert Pollack’s Signs of Life is as inspiring for its original insights as it is unexpected: a real molecular geneticist, with more than his 15 minutes of fame as a respected researcher into viruses and cancer, has composed a convincing and agreeably lyrical ...”

“... of Keynes’s birth in 1883 has come and gone. Last year saw the opportune publication of Robert Skidelsky’s much-heralded new biography – or at least of its first volume, which does not get further than 1920. It is a formidable work, designed to out-Harrod Harrod, which will be an unparalleled source for those interested in the rise of the junior ...”

“... of Nations. But there was always a difficult undertow. Among de Valera’s greatest supporters was Robert Briscoe, a Jew who later became Lord Mayor of Dublin (as did his son Ben Briscoe), but he was never a minister in any Fianna Fáil government because of what Keogh calls ‘an undercurrent of hostility towards Jews in the country which even de Valera ...”

“... reappears transformed. The nudes who cavort in the black water and dance in the deep-violet sky in Robert Huskisson’s Come unto These Yellow Sands are among the most exquisite and sensuous in British art, combining the vitality of Fuseli’s libidinous acrobats with the pearly translucence and sheen of William Etty’s bottom-heavy models. Mid-19th-century ...”

“... the Other Side, putting them in direct competition with their friend Stevenson, owner of the Stone Balloon. They vied for the going talent and Stevenson took to booking Blood, Sweat & Tears and the Pointer Sisters, signing acts to geographically restrictive contracts to keep his edge. The owners of both clubs were soon in over their heads. Jim took out ...”

“... which was said to be the biggest of its kind in the city, was as creepy as its owner. With a stone satyr over the fifteen-foot front door and forty rooms over seven floors, the decor was of the Gothic Quagmire school: according to the FBI agents who raided it at the beginning of July, it contains among other weirdnesses a photo-montage of Epstein ...”

“... so did others as dissimilar as Joseph Brodsky, Andrew Motion and (one of his first translators) Robert Bly. Poets were drawn to translate him too: fellow Northerners like Robin Fulton (for a long time now a resident of Norway, though 48 years ago for small reward he was teaching me geography in Edinburgh) and Robin Robertson, or the Irishman John ...”

“... so would sit obligingly still on the scales. What the dairymaids referred to as a ‘pound-stone’ or a ‘Chedworth Bun’ was in fact a fossilised sea urchin, Clypeus ploti, and was more than 170 million years old. The Lake District to the York Moors. At 18, Smith was hired as an assistant to the surveyor Edward Webb, and by the age of 25 he ...”

“... Homesick Blues’. Even the leading music journals – New Musical Express in Britain, and Rolling Stone in the USA – have found it hard to adjust to the new era; like the rock industry itself, rock critics are primarily interested in stars or guitars. A song combining computer-generated sounds and 37 shouts of ‘go’ isn’t, I suspect, what turns on ...”

“... shapeless hulk, something like an exhumed crypt, as if the builder had sought to objectivise in stone and cement the disorder of his own delirious mind.’ Here we detect the melodramatic imagination at work, giving rise at every turn of phrase to what Vargas Llosa’s study of Madame Bovary calls ‘a certain distortion or exacerbation of ...”