Search Results

“... and rearranging co-ordinates until the city conforms to his reading of it. No longer able to potter out into Notting Hill to check on some detail, he is in the position that Robin Cook found himself in when, working in a vineyard in the South of France, he decided to reinvent himself as ‘Derek Raymond’. Raymond’s late London novels are pure wish ...”

“... conditions – conditions which have now disappeared. We have had the woe-is-England vapourings of Simon Heffer and the rushed observations of Andrew Marr. An academic industry has flourished. Now both Weight and Robert Colls have written requiems for the old Britishness which are also ruminations on a new, more democratic England. Britannia, for so long a ...”

“... a kind of courage of which I would have been incapable.19 May. I’m reading The Unaccompanied, Simon Armitage’s latest collection of poems. They always ring bells, though, like Larkin, he’ll often take off at the end of a poem when I don’t always follow. There’s a lovely funny poem in this collection, ‘Poundland’, which is enviably ...”

“... from the ‘grouch bag’ carried by travelling showmen. His parents were Jewish immigrants: Simon Marrix, of a family of tailors from Alsace-Lorraine, and Minna Schoenberg, the daughter of a Dutch magician who emigrated when his work in Germany ran out in the 1870s. All of the Marxes appear to have been clever with words – ...”

“... question of taste, a question of style … She sits before it, painter before primed canvas, potter before bisque, gilder before wood on which the gesso had been laid.’ Her hands were ‘like the hand of death in a gruesome marble tombscape – but with deep pink fingernails’. One guest, who weaves through the novel, looks like ‘a boiled egg in a ...”

“... woman’s flat’: ‘I washed my hands and the smell lasted for two days.’At the end of 1960 Simon Raven wrote a remarkable piece for Encounter on male prostitutes in London, distinguishing five types with the alert eye of a Mayhew addressing an undescribed trade. He deduces that all come from homes where they were unwanted or misunderstood. There are ...”