“... in Gargnano, Brescia Province, where a large part of The Rotters’ Club was written’ comes close). And yet he’s only being honest. A Touch of Love is indeed influenced by Simone Weil and it is only polite to thank those who have assisted the author with country retreats and Martinis at five. Confessions are evidence of a conscience, and thus to be ...”

“... shared the romance of being a part of it in old New York. For me, the city didn’t just mean Frank Sinatra and Studio 54, it meant Alfred Kazin and Lionel Trilling, Lillian Hellman and Susan Sontag. I loved its papers, the swagger of the contributors, the New York intellectuals, with their neuroses, their arguments, their marriages, and their ...”

“... than the present action is likely to give rise to. But it was in any case the representation of a close-up war: physically distant on the earth but physically close in the lens. What has been happening in the South Atlantic, up to the point where British troops went back on the islands, has been a war of technical ...”

“... to seem exaggerated. He was pilloried as an advocate of ‘free love’, and the scandal of the close connection between his own unorthodox love life and that of the sexually emancipated heroines of his novels Ann Veronica (1909) and The New Machiavelli (1911) for a while put him beyond the pale even for some of the more progressive sections of London ...”

“... and trunk) and between a songless predator and hawkish politics. Sometimes the verse is lured close to flat protest (‘Prison is never/going to be/over’), yet ‘On the Virtue of the Dead Tree’ regains its gravity in a staggering overlay of darkness and threat at its close:the holy place shuts, baggy with ...”

“... us in his topic more than we expected to be – but seems less so if we recall the preface to Frank Manuel’s earlier work, The Prophets of Paris, a book which has been incorporated, largely unchanged, into the present history and constitutes, in my judgment, its strongest section. ‘The tracing of disembodied moral and philosophical ...”

“... years with no children, “dates” his wife; they live together in a fun-fun lifestyle that is close to that typified in Playboy magazine’). Although some demographers predict that one in five women born between 1956 and 1972 will never have children, most of them by choice, the intentionally childless are once again practically invisible. Instead, the ...”

“... assertion of the individual’, but the individual it had in mind was a type: something close to, but certainly not to be confused with, more common ‘species’ such as the goofy flapper, the golfing girl or the ‘trick vamp’.Parker spent much of her time at Vanity Fair delineating these and other species in reviews, features and a popular ...”

“... leave it for a while to see if it catches a gull’s eye, then put it in the bin. 24 May. Run into Frank Dickens the cartoonist walking down the stalled escalator at Camden Town Tube. Says that in Bristow, his strip in the Standard, he’s about to introduce the concept of Desk Rage, with frenzied attacks on other people in the office. About the same age as ...”

“... time for you to piss off now.’ I gave up writing football match reports soon after that close encounter. Although funny in retrospect, it hadn’t been funny at the time, and I kept thinking about that scarred face, about the purity of the ill-will displayed there. (I ought also to record that my decision to retire was facilitated by the descent ...”

“... a public building as she is to Lord Longford, whom she presses into drying the dinner dishes: ‘Frank looked pale ... He said he would note it in his diary.’ She is convivial and an eager recorder of conversations. Talk she considers ‘frivolous’ can be redeemed by the production of a new fact. When the Boothbys come to dinner they discuss Baldwin and ...”

“... and Fanny Imlay, the deaths of Mary’s children Clare in 1818 and William in 1819, coming so close together must have had for her the weight of a curse. This story of 1820 seems to say that in a family where only forbidden affections can thrive it is better that all life cease. Read alongside Frankenstein, it also confirms Jay Macpherson’s argument in ...”

“... It’s debatable whether even the most determined listener could appreciate the finer points of Frank Zappa without a brain half fried on LSD. The combination of feelgood sociability with the visceral tingle of music which itself shadows the Ecstasy experience – moving between warm calm and frantic crescendos – is what appeals to the E-heads. The surge ...”

“... in a country whose genius has gone?’ Lev Loseff asks in his poem ‘June 1972’; Loseff’s close friend Joseph Brodsky had left Leningrad that month. The question brings to mind the title of Chernyshevsky’s 1863 novel, which soon came to codify a central preoccupation of the Russian intelligentsia. But in this instance it also raises the notion that ...”

“... with Elizabeth Taylor. But her place in the sun came with His Way: The Unauthorised Biography of Frank Sinatra, which raised Sinatra’s hoodlum status to the point where she was sued for two million dollars. Sinatra dropped the action, and Kelley’s book went to number one, but she was now singled out as an author who would reach for the very ceiling of ...”