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“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... when Donald Trump flew in to complain about a plan to put offshore wind turbines in the North Sea close to his luxury golf resort at Balmedie, near Aberdeen. I asked the Parliament’s press office if Sick Boy and Renton used the same room, maybe it’s the best one, they keep it nice for special visitors. ‘The scene was filmed in a committee room at the ...”

“... Margaret declares that Earl’s Court is full of ‘prostitutes and Aw-stralians’. Jesse becomes close to a Liverpudlian poet and, later, a Lebanese-French architect. But it’s not just about accents. My sentences owe as much to Timbaland beats as anything literary, and I found many of them exhausting to deliver. Sometimes a throwaway comment directed at ...”

“... years later, Lee says that it illustrates the ‘crushed, strangled feeling that had driven me close to madness’. During the Second World War, Bevan had been responsible, almost single-handedly, for keeping oppositional politics going in the Commons, repeatedly challenging Churchill’s running of the country and the war. Churchill described him as a ...”

“... domestic surveillance programme, determined that the man who had fallen from the window was Frank Olson, a chemist employed by the CIA. Hersh disclosed his findings to Olson’s family, who convened a press conference and announced that they would be suing the agency. Ford’s chief of staff, Donald Rumsfeld, was alerted to the danger by his ...”

“... Fuzzy and Jean at school, Miss Educated in Seacliff psychiatric hospital, Waldo to the writer Frank Sargeson, Janetta in Ibiza. Then there was what people said about her: she was dirty, a thief, shy, different, an aspiring poet, ‘a lovely girl, no trouble at all’, officially insane, ‘pleasant to the guests at all times’, the ‘niece who is going ...”

“... In fact, in 1978, the year after Lowell’s death, Blackwood posted them to Lowell’s friend Frank Bidart in Boston. Bidart, Saskia Hamilton writes, ‘put the envelope under his bed, and later transferred it to the Houghton Library in Harvard, with a cover note stating that “This packet of letters belongs to the Estate of Robert Lowell, not to ...”