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“... dispelled by recovering its sources and trying to turn their potency to benign ends. Like any good white magician, Syberberg insists that rationalist denials of evil can only end in specious evasion. Hence his bold use of Wagner throughout, not so much to point a historical lesson as to invade and numb the senses. We are encouraged to let ourselves become ...”

“... words of the book’s last page: ‘Through his father – who knew nothing of Gorteen, Duntally, Norman towers, and lonely headlands – the uncanny facial resemblance, the poetry, the wild blood had been transferred across the Atlantic Ocean to this cold winter land, to this, his father’s harsh native city in which he now lay dying. He looked at his ...”

“... tells EU: it’s war.’ ‘There’s been nothing like it since the Falklands,’ crowed Norman Tebbit on his weekly page. Much anti-foreigner fun was had in Wapping: burn German flags, quote Churchill to German tourists. Major was portrayed in Beefeater costume; the paper offered posters, car suckers, free beefburgers. ‘Steer we go steer we ...”

“... was unable to come to the conference.’ Perhaps Gilbert was simply busy, or recuperating from a white-water rafting or a hang-gliding contretemps. But of course the words can also be interpreted to mean that Gilbert was invited, but not offered the co-chairmanship. One must be practical after all: the gentlemen of Pennzoil might never have heard of ...”

“... for their own names. Indeed, this has been a central function of indexes since the great days of white male writers, when William F. Buckley sent Norman Mailer a copy of his book The Unmaking of a Mayor and wrote ‘Hi!’ in the index next to Mailer’s name. Job’s comforters will want to be the first to tell you that ...”

“... from great movies: the likes of Richard Blaine and Ilsa Lund, George Bailey, Travis Bickle and Norman Bates, who turn out, in the interstices of the entries, to have entangled lives and a dark plot all of their own. If only Howard Hawks wasn’t dead and had made a movie of Suspects we could all die happy and go to deconstruction heaven. Though the ...”

“... to be rich: ‘I already owned five fur coats,’ she wrote in her memoir, ‘so I ordered a white mink, floor length, and wore it with pleasure, even if it did make me look like I was rolling along on casters.’ Despite which, as she discovered, she was being paid less than her male colleagues. Muriel meanwhile battled on against headaches, depression ...”

“... editors, ‘I wish to point out to you, an editor of the New Yorker,’ he writes to Katharine White, ‘that Mr West’s review of Augie March is disgraceful … Let us hope that it is only my mental health that is endangered and not that of your readers as well.’ Two weeks later, he is putting on his best shirt for Lionel Trilling. ‘The many ...”

“... As we raise our voices in a solemn prayer … From the mountains, to the prairies, To the oceans, white with foam God bless America, My home sweet home. Goddamnit: in the end, everything gets alloyed in the melting pot, including Guthrie, all-American hero. ‘For a man who fought all his life against being respectable, this comes as a stunning ...”

“... knee breeks black silk stockings high heeled shoes with large buckles, blue coat, yellow vest white neck cloth with stiffner and frilled shirt – he is one of the Queen Ann folks’. The pretty brick so-called Queen Anne style of the 1870s which Thomson thus mocked was the architecture of a perplexed generation. Invented largely by ex-assistants of Sir ...”

“... writer of prose, and after the Second World War, every male contender – William Styron, Norman Mailer, Gore Vidal, James Jones, Joseph Heller – had done some service and wanted to write literary masterpieces filled with the perfumes of combat.* It is only in more recent times that the task of writing novels about battle has fallen chiefly to bad ...”

“... a visit to Greenwich fair. On her honeymoon in America, she attended a fancy dress ball at the White House as an Arab maiden with golden coins in her hair. But though she adored the fictional stereotype of the Oriental princess, she disliked the condition of contemporary Algerian women. Her refined Unitarian instincts rebelled against the social and ...”

“... other ‘wet’ challengers from the inside who had been cast aside by Thatcher – Mark Carlisle, Norman St John Stevas, Sir Ian Gilmour – Prior was not made of the stuff to fight the leader of his own party. A mild, bumbling man, he preferred not to step out of line. Michael Heseltine was different. Rich, abrasive and ambitious, Heseltine was fed up with ...”

“... brilliant criminal and the subject of one of the great pieces of modern American writing, Norman Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song. Gilmore forswore further appeals and faced the firing squad wearing his famously indestructible Timex watch: scarcely typical and followed by a mere trickle of other deaths. There were no executions in 1978 or 1980, one ...”

“... into quiet conversation. Ice-cream kiss of almond blossom, bridal abundance of cherry: pink and white. Yellow pom-poms of japonica, horticultural cheerleaders. In a corner, under a high wall that gives away the previous identity of this public park as a decommissioned energy-generating plant, retired workers sway, stiffly and slowly, in t’ai chi ...”