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“... ego. The most famous and successful venture in homosexual ventriloquism by a novelist is still Anthony Burgess’s Earthly Powers. I had doubts about the book when it came out in 1980, disliking the easy equation of homosexuality with cowardliness, even though this was an equation accepted by many homosexuals of the generation of Burgess’s octogenarian ...”

“... decided to withdraw from Raqqa and other hard to defend, lightly populated areas in the north and west and focus instead on consolidating the government’s hold on Damascus and the heavily populated areas linking the capital to Latakia in the north-east. But as the army gained in strength with the Joint Chiefs’ support, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey ...”

“... that’s just cheer-leading, not truth-telling – for which Williams was supposedly renowned. Anthony Barnett, for example, writes that ‘Raymond Williams stands for a kind of truthfulness.’ To read Williams on the miners’ strike is to wonder about such a judgment. And it wasn’t just the miners’ strike. Listen to Williams on The Forward March of ...”

“... Wapping was a tragedy. Meanwhile the press which empowers him, the literate liberal press of the West, has become a thinly scattered archipelago from which, every so often, one more island disappears. Ascherson works from a highly privileged atoll. The relative freedom of its space has turned him from chronicler into essayist. Not in the old sense, when the ...”

“... shows in the choice of musicals above all. The only musicals to get in are Singing in the Rain and West Side Story rather than films starring Ginger Rogers or Judy Garland or Rita Hayworth or Barbra Streisand, or films choreographed by Busby Berkeley, with his unique combination of low popular appeal and high cinematic art. Thomson is passionately ...”

“... invited to jump the editorial immigration queue. At six times fewer pages than the next entry (Anthony Thwaite), the answer may be that his is a tourist visa. As their titles suggest, geography is equally crucial to the trade war pitting Longman against Norton. Given the inevitable overlap between their contents, it may be all that allows some harried ...”

“... of the Gaullists – which I was instructed to smuggle home among my shirts and hand over to Mr Anthony Eden. A little later, I met the most enchanting and Candidean of my French relations. He had been in trouble as early as 1940 for shouting ‘Vive la Pologne!’ when charging with the bayonet – on the grounds that this was a war declared on behalf of ...”

“... sophisticated poems versed in the Anglo-American tradition, dedicated to the likes of Mark Strand, Anthony Hecht and Susan Sontag, and aimed primarily at a circle of readers in London and New York. (He has evidently succeeded in that aim: the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation has just bestowed on him its ‘Genius Award’ – $250,000 with no ...”

“... that Orwell was fundamentally different from Mark Twain or George Eliot or O. Henry or Rebecca West. Certainly his motives for writing under a name other than his own seem straightforward enough. He was writing about his life among the ‘lowest of the low’, and his lower-upper-middle-class family might be embarrassed by his confessions: they were ...”

“... writing more than the market would bear from any one name. In ‘straight’ fiction one can cite Anthony Burgess as someone who has borrowed this downmarket technique. In the famously productive year of his death sentence – having been misinformed that he had a terminal illness, and wishing to provide for his family – Burgess was driven to the expedient ...”

“... Labour towns, unsusceptible to the apocalyptic communism of the Rhondda Valley slightly further west. In his early years, before he became a Labour councillor, Bevan was attracted by the founding text of Welsh militant unionism, The Miners’ Next Step (a product of the Rhonnda, largely written in 1912 by the Marxist Noah Ablett). As a teenage ...”

“... structured around him that it was once called a ‘one-man stand-up tragedy routine’ (by Samuel West, a fine Hamlet for the RSC in 2001) might also have given Yorick a run for his money as an incisive jester. I can’t think of anything in English drama before Shakespeare comparable to this quip, and it certainly isn’t the kind of remark Oedipus was ever ...”

“... Joseph Sturge, William Morgan and John Angell James); major cultural figures such as Anthony Trollope, Thomas Carlyle and John Stuart Mill, all of whom took part in the public debate about the events in Jamaica; as well as officers, scribes, landowners, creolised whites, metropolitan intellectuals. Like her Baptist missionaries, they all became ...”

“... Lauren, ‘the first designer to base a fashion philosophy on American history. He took the Wild West of cowboys and homesteaders, the Native Americans and their traditional crafts skills, the Long Island Edwardian country life of the Vanderbilts and the Whitneys, the American dream of 1930s movies – and added the ice-cool sophistication of Manhattan in ...”

“... eventually result in 2015’s The Little Red Chairs, which begins in the pinned locality of the west of Ireland but soon enlarges to include a Bosnian Serb war criminal and The Hague – though her descriptions of stone massages are still more immediate than her descriptions of the courtroom, and we wouldn’t want it otherwise.Her new novel, Girl, is ...”