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“... copulate with their eyes shut, whether or not they think of England, and sometimes have a nice time, even so, which suggests that the mantlepiece, though mute, might have its own opinions on what makes a good stoke. Then again, if having sex with an ugly woman sent George III mad, the neurasthenia to which married women of the 18th and 19th centuries ...”

“... one of several umbrellas, is adjusting the noose. Powell’s co-conspirators, George Atzerodt and David Herold, still have their heads free: their expressions – private reckoning, a kind of baffled fear – are legible on their faces. A large man in a white coat and Panama hat is fussing round them, carrying with him the incongruous atmosphere of a summer ...”

“... The connectionist approach is different. In 1986, the psychologists James McClelland and David Rumelhart proposed a network that learns verbs by building associative links between stems and their past tense forms. The network is ‘trained’ by repeated exposure to such pairs, without any appeal to rules or innate knowledge. Pinker published a ...”

“... of emotion,’ Vernon recalls of his friendship with Jesus. ‘My buddy, who once did the best David Letterman impression you ever saw, has been abducted by glandular acids.’ (Compare Richard Tull’s lament in The Information that, at 45, he no longer ‘snags on the DNA’. Amis is being literary; but Vernon is not supposed to be a writer.) For all the ...”

“... the house in his wheelchair. As they drive off, Clune says: ‘His wheelchair did look real nice, though. It was brand new, practically. It had the red leather armrests. I bet he wouldn’t feel too bad if he did have to wheel himself to the store.’ He also writes about his theory of addiction, in which the colour white takes on several meanings. As ...”

“... Thatcher. Work is the only escape, which fortunately moves along a little.9 May. My birthday. A nice woman in a leopardskin coat who always speaks wishes me a happy birthday. I say that I wish it was. ‘Why? What’s happened?’ ‘Last Thursday. The election.’ ‘Oh, you don’t want to worry about that. They’re all the same.’ At which point (we ...”

“... thanks to propaganda campaigns spearheaded by Bullingdon Club toffs like Boris Johnson and David Cameron, underwent significant revision. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, when the horse path alongside the Regent’s Canal was mud, and forbidden to pedestrians and cyclists alike, I rode to my gardening job in Limehouse on a market wreck bought for ...”

“... There were other papers, sometimes cheap and nasty; and the most famous paper of all had been nice to Hitler at the time of Munich. But the press was part of the fabric of a free society. It was held in trust for us all. The truth was rather different. Scott had acquired the Manchester Guardian in 1907 and henceforth it was ‘carried on as a public ...”

“... draped Art Deco dryads, fishbowl lights and heavy velvet curtains. The set was screaming for a David Lynch remake of The Masque of the Red Death. Room Three, Hotel Esperance, Finistère: a beacon of hope at the end of a darkening continent. But something embedded layers deep, mephitic and beyond redemption, was present in this city. All the coded signs ...”

“... tough keeping track of all the debutantes promenading into print and creating a stir: Donna Tartt, David Leavitt, Mary Gaitskill, Lorrie Moore, Amy Hempel, Nancy Lemann, Susan Minot, Mary Robison, Anderson Ferrell – a cast of dozens. Many of those rookies trained at the literary dojo of the author, editor, creative writing teacher and guru-mentor-mindgamer ...”

“... Water Eaton were of ‘good working-class stock, but unintelligent. The sort of people who are nice to you when you come canvassing, but who will not buy a copy of the Daily Worker as they “already get the Herald, thank you very much.”’ Later a great mythologiser of her own social status, implying an ‘Anglo-Irish’ ascendancy background which she ...”

“... in time for dinner. ‘We can just have something quick, don’t you know. Maybe cold meat and a nice green salad and a tomato aspic that you can prepare in the morning, before you leave?’‘So, what do you conclude?’ This was a question Segal’s friend Vivian Gornick would often ask and to which she would reply: ‘I’m not in the concluding ...”

“... have to hold my breath for fear of infecting the people who come near me.’ A view shared by David Gascoyne (with whom she was briefly in love, she nearly 40, he not yet 20), who wrote: ‘On the whole, I think her influence on the people she comes in contact with is bad ... There are very few who can stand the dazzling (but how depressing!) light of ...”

“... life are tellingly invoked. Then there is an amazingly learned search for the sources of David’s Oath of the Horatii. The trail leads through Gluck, Garrick, the ballet-master Noverre, Lavoisier, Beaumarchais and (less of a displaced person now, than when Wind was writing in 1941) Salieri. It is nard to imagine a reader with any developed interest ...”

“... mother of Solomon, and finally as J, mistress of the sublime and the uncanny as well as of King David. In this new book Bloom cheerfully accepts the reviewer’s proposal. That the author of what eventually became the Torah should have been the relict of the unlucky Uriah, and not an Israelite, but a Hittite, was plainly irresistible. Henceforth, he ...”