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“... else in Britain. The Report on a Highway Plan for Glasgow, produced by the consultant engineers Scott Wilson Kirkpatrick for the corporation in 1965, is extraordinarily bold. The city centre – in the report, a dense, slum-ridden, sooty horror – has been evacuated and encircled by a vast motorway on stilts. At Charing Cross, apart from the ...”

“... of the Modern has the crowd scenes and bustle of the historiography of its period, the age of Scott, Guizot, Thiers and de Tocqueville. The language, on the other hand, practised, vigorous, unreflective and rather characterless, belongs to modern serious journalism. Johnson’s four interweaving themes – ‘big’ politics, commerce and ...”

“... In The Green Knight we have to contend with Lucas and Clement Graffe, Harvey Blacket, Bellamy James and his dog Anax, the Anderson women – Louise and her daughters Alethea (Aleph), Sophia (Sefton) and Moira (Moy) – Emil and Clive and the Adwardens. A reader alert to social differences will find such names far from neutral. An odour of class hangs ...”

“... from Wyndham’s Day of the Triffids (very clearly a novel about conflict between species) to James Blish’s A Case of Conscience (surely the only novel ever to have been based on a thorough reading of George Gosse’s Omphalos, his totally discredited reconciliation of Darwin and the Book of Genesis). Yet the questions remain, are even stimulated by ...”

“... a marketing tag, not a manifesto – caused a stir when it was published in the US in June. James Wood reviewed it at length in the New Yorker. Heti, he said, ‘may well have identified a central dialectic of 21st-century postmodern being’, but he also complained that her ‘prose is what one might charitably call basic’. The radical feminist ...”

“... with the wives answering the phones. Then: world domination. Welcome to the inside track on what Scott Fitzgerald called ‘the orgastic future’. In Britain, soap operas tend to be about poor people, and the drama of American capitalism can seem both obnoxious and ridiculous, yet the rise of CAA is a wonderful story of greed and genius. What is a good ...”

“... of the subject there, and to have scripted the contributions assigned to the Ettrick Shepherd, James Hogg. One scholar has asserted that the imaginary Hogg was an improvement on the real one, but the contributions do not bear this out. What did ‘James Hogg’ think of the ‘proceedings of these two Irish ...”

“... University Library (and in a 1973 facsimile, edited by Matthew J. Bruccoli). According to James West, editor of Trimalchio, the typescript of 27 October constitutes a completed version: ‘Naturally he expected to see proofs, and surely he planned to do some revising on them, but there is no evidence that, on 27 October, he contemplated major ...”

“... dated from the 15th century. The family’s first hereditary honour was a baronetcy conferred by James I in 1622, largely to raise revenue; the first baronet must have been a disappointment in that regard, as he went to prison for debt in 1629 and again in 1638. His son and heir was imprisoned for political reasons in 1646, and pardoned in 1651. The third ...”

“... after the Civil War, while Europe had to wait for the industrial impetus of the 1914 conflict. As Scott Fitzgerald wisely observed, culture follows money, so by the time he was enjoying the Twenties and dunking Zelda in the Plaza fountain New York was where it was at. Manhattan is not New York, and New York, as people fall asleep telling you, is not ...”

“... first silenced the monster, thus removing the formal characteristic of a dialogue. On these points James Whale’s film of 1931 follows Peake’s stage version, so that Boris Karloff’s monster, the definitive realisation, exacts emotions of terror and pity but not of social indignation. The filmgoer who consults Mary Shelley’s text in a modern reprint will ...”

“... Rossetti met her first love. She was not yet 18 when Gabriel’s friend and fellow art student James Collinson took an interest in her. A quiet, meek little chap from a philistine Midlands family, he was to join the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood for a while, hover between Anglicanism and Catholicism, and paint rather good genre pictures, the chief of ...”

“... to sift through Gordon’s many pages for comments that might prove useful.According to Katherine Scott, one of O’Connor’s schoolteachers, ‘it was obvious that she was a genius. Warped, but a genius all the same.’ Critics have tended to seize on biographical details, portraying her as a crackpot visionary from the Bible Belt. Time magazine’s review ...”

“... did nothing to help Byron’s character; but he could hardly have been Byron without it. Scott astutely thought him ‘a patrician on principle’: the business of being important was crucially important to the business of being Byron. His snobbery was mostly venial. He liked the idea of his mother’s family more than his father’s because of its ...”

“... Gwen Stacy, Peter Parker’s ethereal blonde girlfriend, who would haunt him as Kim Novak haunts James Stewart in Vertigo; The Unmasking of Green Goblins 1, 2, and 3 (a shock each time); The Marriage of Aunt May to Doctor Octopus (an odious villain) – were well behind him. And Peter Parker had settled for what seemed to us a second-best girlfriend, the ...”