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“... It’s also true that the olden days had long been invaded by other habits. We did still go to a crowded cinema to see a film we’d been waiting for. But the crowd wasn’t guaranteed: we could also – as I often did – see films in cinemas entirely empty of other humans. The size of the screen, and the sound that you couldn’t moderate, made a ...”

“... and given its usual luck should also survive the Bicentenary, although it could be touch and go. Crocodile Dundee made Australia flavour of the month. For the Bicentenary, emulsifiers and preservatives have been added so as to make the flavour of the month last a whole year. Inevitably, the result is hard to swallow. A country is not a commodity. To ...”

“... Eugène Demolder. When Demolder followed up with a short book a few months later it was titled James Ensor, la mort mystique d’un théologien. (The great Verhaeren, poet of the revolutionary crowd, lent his name to a second monograph in 1908.) You have to work hard to find Demolder’s 1892 subtitle acknowledged in the art-historical literature, but it ...”

“... breed British chemists. It was founded in 1845, the result of a private subscription set up by Sir James Clark (the Queen’s physician), Michael Faraday and the Prince Consort. Its first director, recruited from Germany, was August Wilhelm von Hofmann. Perkin became a student there in 1853. Hofmann was already investigating coal-tar derivatives, aniline ...”

“... It was the patrician Alan Clark who most accurately summed up the approach of the British and American Governments to the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war. Nothing, he reckoned, was better for business than a lot of foreigners killing one another. This has been true of all foreign wars throughout the ages, but for businessmen of the Clark mentality a hot war in the Eighties which demanded endless supplies of expensive weaponry and technology was almost too good to be true ...”

“... and ‘Bastard Headquarters’, meaning God’s Heaven, or, more generally, the place where things go wrong or get fucked up, said in one letter to be located in France). It cost the Huntington $90,000 to obtain the Amis archive and not everyone approved the purchase. The Huntington’s prime collections are from earlier periods. It possesses half the titles ...”

“... bricklayer’s labourer or the turner of a razor grinder’s wheel’; Basil Hall, the son of James Hall, a baronet and MP, wrote to his father describing the plain sailors’ fare he and the other midshipmen ate at dinner (‘salt beef, pork or pudding’); William Swabey, a captain in the Royal Horse Artillery, spent his time on the Portuguese border ...”

“... of William Blake intoning ‘Ah, Sunflower’ to him ‘like God had a human voice’. James Campbell, who introduces a note of irony into his reworking of twice-told Beat tales, refers to Ginsberg’s historic undergraduate illumination as ‘hand-held’ – perhaps an allusion to a key detail in what he had said to me: the fact that an act of ...”

“... book in them? You’d certainly think so if you look at the list of people who’ve given it a go: her New York maid (Lena Pepitone), two of her husbands (James Dougherty, Arthur Miller), her half-sister (Berniece Miracle), her stalkers (Robert Slatzer, James Haspiel), her saviours ...”

“... edited by John Lahr, which are to be published in October. Among the slogans (‘Think Alan Clark meets Alan Bennett’ – no, don’t) and the paraphernalia (a padlock and key) is a pamphlet of highlights. A good many of the selected entries concern spanking, and a good many others are anecdotes about Hemingway, Dietrich, Olivier, Vivien Leigh, Miles ...”

“... of her body, an X-ray and CAT-scan images of her spine. Interviewed by Stephen Barber and David Clark, the editors of Regarding Sedgwick, she said that she was finding it hard to ‘take pleasure in writing’, and was much more drawn to the visual than the verbal, to texture rather than texts. In her introduction to Touching Feeling, a collection of essays ...”

“... of the void which can lead to the edgeless terrors of agoraphobia. Some people actually did go West – most notably the Forty-Niners, a very mixed bunch with very mixed motives who headed for California in that year. They found gold or didn’t, as the case might be. So much, we may say, is history. But just as the West was indeed California, but also ...”

“... Dickens’s own contemporaries, tentatively sketching the scene in oil or watercolour. For Henry James, less cinematic, more plangent, the appeal of the ruins along the Appian Way ‘seems ever to arise out of heaven knows what depths of ancient trouble’. James confessed to taking a ‘perverse’ pleasure in ruinous ...”

“... in Hampden’), no revelation that is not a disclosure. Too zealously mapped, the novel cannot go its own way. The story compels, but it doesn’t involve. We do not really care when Richard learns that the gang (minus Bunny) have murdered a farmer while dancing in the woods in a bacchanalian frenzy. Nor when the gang (plus Richard) kill Bunny, who figures ...”

“... Christie or an Elmore Leonard. The formula is simple, repeated with variations in most of M.R. James’s 33 ghost stories, and still guaranteed to give pleasure today just as it did to those fuddled dons and sleepy schoolboys who first heard James read them by the light of a single candle in the provost’s lodgings at ...”