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“... Barry will, I’d imagine, be a familiar one to many readers: the runt, the bully, the supposedly nice one, who of course needs the others to make him feel more on top of things than he actually is. This is just one of the classic ways in which men bond. What has happened to Rob and his girlfriend will be equally familiar. Laura has left her live-in partner ...”

“... Modern​ Hollywood isn’t really Hollywood – it’s Calabasas. With everyone now the David O. Selznick of his own social picture, gossip replaced with tweets, and fan magazines with selfies, the grandeur of old Hollywood can seem mythical. Like proper myths, its stories are almost exclusively about metamorphosis, self-destruction and things going wrong, but they are at least stories as opposed to advertisements ...”

“... pleasure that remains to me: I indulge in reading about movies with undiminished enthusiasm. David Thomson has written about his disappointment with contemporary cinema, about how the franchise movie and the blockbuster are killing Hollywood and his hopes, and because I am one of the legion of Thomson’s devoted fans, it cheers me up to hear it. If he ...”

“... ground and offers mercy; the furious Saracen struggles on, and is dispatched by a dagger thrust. David Slavitt’s new abridged translation of the Furioso aims to amuse. ‘The great lesson this work can have for students,’ he writes in the preface, ‘is that poetry can be fun.’ To convey this lesson he adds dozens of his own quips, jokes and ...”

“... Julian Barnes’s diary). He records meeting, in the same week, Princess Margaret, Ionesco and David Hockney. David Bowie offers to take over a part in The Real Thing; the Duchess of Devonshire appears as ‘Debo’ on page 33. Stoppard is not unaware of the effect: ‘I’m getting quite impressed by some of our ...”

“... deal that needed explaining. Some, like the Italian interviewer, have dwelt on the appeal of the David-and-Goliath conflict between the Gauls and the Roman superpower. Or, at least, David and Goliath with a twist: Astérix doesn’t beat brute force by superior cunning and intelligence – he does it thanks to his ...”

“... and its eclectic membership included the philosopher Bernard Williams, the sports commentator David Coleman and the agony aunt Marje Proops. The report they produced two years later was measured, intelligent, elegantly written, slightly agonised and almost wholly ineffectual. The Rothschild Commission accepted that the law on gambling in Britain remained ...”

“... how carefully Lawrence refuses to recognise virtue in anyone but himself’), and his sponsor David Pryce-Jones now finds F.R. Leavis much the same, so it may be legitimate to cite the famous excoriation of Bloomsbury that was voiced by Lawrence and amplified by Leavis: ‘they talked endlessly, but endlessly – and never, never a good thing said. They ...”

“... that the press and media are setting out as the crucial issues before the nation.’ This is nice for editors. But it defies rational explanation. Koss calls this sort of influence ‘a quasi-meteorological power’, a weather-forecasting function to which politicians become addicted. The one thing that party leaders dread is silence. Any voice from the ...”

“... the same term to the ritual obscenities of bottle-throwing soccer fans somehow seems misplaced. David Riches is aware of this incongruity. His symposium contains 11 papers by 11 different authors drawn from the Proceedings of an ESRC-funded conference held at St Andrews University in January 1985. The violence under discussion is not a concept which readily ...”

“... Bolsheviks’ old opponents in the Marxist revolutionary movement) such as Boris Nikolaevsky, David Dalin and Rafael Abramovich – and Alexander Kerensky, the leader of the Russian Provisional government overthrown by the Bolsheviks in 1917. When Nikolaevsky and Dalin visited the DP camps in Germany, Russian DPs anxiously waiting for US visas saw them as ...”

“... matter as hopeless’. He disliked speaking about his background because, as he said (working a nice line in parodic lordliness), ‘one has so little pleasure in reciting the anecdotes of beggary.’ One childhood pleasure was rummaging among the books in his father’s shop. The hodge-podge of works he found there, from arcane philosophy to popular ...”

“... so successful that Olivia’s father eventually approved the marriage. Twain could not say enough nice things about Livy, but tried. Thinking of her he thought of their children, which reminded him of Susy, whose warmth and curiosity had delighted her father. Susy is pretty much at the centre of the rest of the first volume of the Autobiography. He is haunted ...”

“... 11 January. It’s not to disparage David Bowie, but if even a fraction of the tributes being paid to him and his influence were true we would never have had a Conservative government or indeed any government at all. Hearing the news on the Today programme this morning R. nearly cries. I met Bowie only once, at John Schlesinger’s sometime in the 1980s, and remember him as a slight, almost colourless figure, who was somehow Scots ...”

“... us – but he has made it his stock-in-trade. It does not make for intimacy of collaboration, as David Owen recognised in coining the soubriquet ‘le Roi lean Quinze’. The point about the grand manner is that it only really comes off in context, when the level of events rises to match it. They laughed at Macmillan, until he became prime minister, and at ...”