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“... have tended to feel either hagiographic or hostile. The famous early masterpiece of debunking was Richard Schickel’s The Disney Version, published in 1968 and a product of that anti-establishment end-of-decade. Loveable Uncle Walt had been dead for less than two years. Schickel’s work is still superbly readable and shrewd even when it is deeply unfair; it ...”

“... suddenly he would break into a big smile. He was gracious, but he said what he thought.’ Like Richard Yates, a near contemporary and friend who was also famous on the writing-school circuit for not being famous, Williams served in the war and had a few unsuccessful marriages, drank too much, promoted a writerly ideal of Flaubert-like strenuousness, and ...”

“... out in a group of ambitious black male writers who came of age in the 1930s and 1940s and included Richard Wright (born 1908), Ralph Ellison (1914) and James Baldwin (1924), Himes has never quite entered the pantheon. His peers were condescending: Wright never took him seriously as an artist; Ellison, who saw him as little more than an ex-con with a pen, joked ...”

“... evening, if they tried. The difference was that their killing was a secret. People living a few miles away could see tall towers which every few hours gushed flame-red and black. But they were not meant to know why. Once there was a time when the most evil people on earth were ashamed to write their crime across the heavens. Now, too late, leaders are ...”

“... got a couple of quarts of blackberries in his arms, picked with the morning dew, five hundred miles away.’ Edward Dorn.) Even Ben Watson, whose poodle parlour is wall to wall with off-piste names, admits (in conversation) that he has never been introduced to Woolf’s work: ‘My book’s sub-plot is Philip K. Dick, sales-talk, Hollywood and ...”

“... confounded his public when, after a steady diet of Bach and Beethoven, he turned to composers like Richard Strauss, Sibelius, Grieg and Bizet, praising them to the skies and certainly above the pianistic romantics whom everyone else played. Even with Bach and Mozart, he chose tempi that defied convention and, since he played the same work differently on ...”

“... and in this its title supports me, for, though West is discussing Robert Elsmere, The Case of Richard Meynell and Daphne, the ethos that Mrs Humphry Ward puts forward is the only thing that really interests her. Even when she comments that on every relevant page the face of the heroine Catherine Leyburn ‘works with emotion and is illuminated by a ...”

“... so the soggy, sentimental myth-message about Scottish soldiers, high roads, low roads and longest miles back would tell us. The only Scot in Hardy’s fiction is called Farfrae – it is his ethnic destiny to be far from home, a native even less capable of return than Clym Yeobright. Other émigrés and déracinés seem to manage it better. Raymond ...”

“... It’s also the case that the great Stakhanovs of the road, people who’ve chucked a lifetime of miles over their shoulders like so many million kilos of coal, have little to say for themselves. They glow with the retrospective triumph of beating some impoverished vendor down by a dinar for an earthenware cup, or repairing a tyre with a slice of their own ...”

“... the automatic imposition of draconian bail conditions on striking miners. Even the now saintly Richard Scott, scourge of late Toryism, was unable to resist the invention of a new common law tort so as to be able to attack the members of a union intent only on exercising what they believed were their civil liberties. It was not statute which compelled the ...”

“... slogan, on the grounds that even the colonists didn’t expect to send their MPs thousands of miles to Westminster. This is to ignore the fundamental and fairly obvious point that, this being so, they had the right to insist on being taxed only by their own assemblies. What we’re given instead of ideas are the earthy particulars, often recounted with ...”

“... of the boat) and the ‘boat boy’, Charles Vivian. They made good time: ‘a run of 45 to 50 miles in seven hours and a half’, Williams noted in his journal. A week later, Shelley, Williams and Vivian embarked on the return voyage. At around half past six a storm hit and the boat went down with all hands. Their bodies were washed ashore near Viareggio ...”

“... looks as if you really have something here.’ On receiving this verdict from the poet Josephine Miles in 1951, the young Ammons was taken aback: he’d expected ‘bad news’. Yet whatever the something was that Mr Ammons had, it remained hidden from view for some time. He brought out his first volume, Ommateum, with a vanity press in 1955, and, as he ...”

“... had children themselves. Supported by Tetty’s funds, Johnson established at Edial Hall, three miles west of Lichfield, what he described as a ‘private boarding-school for Young Gentlemen’. Following months of careful preparation, the enterprise was a disaster. Only a few pupils ever turned up, among them the future theatrical superstar David ...”

“... ever have occurred to us, had we not learned them from TV? Some years ago, I met the photographer Richard Avedon when he came to take a group portrait of some Scottish writers in a Glasgow bar. By chance, I had recently been to see his retrospective exhibition, Evidence, at the National Portrait Gallery, and had become almost obsessed by the series of ...”