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“... the roads have potholes which could hide the many vagrant horses, donkeys and sheep; and young boys hang from the signposts till they are wildly twisted about. To find your way is pleasantly difficult – but even more pleasant is the difficulty of being found. Among other splendid things,‘the West’ is the land of transplanted urban dream ...”

“... or fairies. When Synge quickened a fire by holding a newspaper against the mouth of the chimney, a young woman called him a sorcerer: ‘It’s to hell you’ll be going by and by.’ When the De Profundis was recommended to Synge to ward off evil spirits it was clear to him that the traffic also flowed in the opposite direction. Or in every direction: the ...”

“... of ‘undesirables’ in the summer of 1940 included nearly ten thousand women, hundreds with young children. Several were well known: Hannah Arendt; Dora Benjamin, Walter’s sister; Marta Feuchtwanger, wife of Lion; the actress Dita Parlö, whose character falls in love with Jean Gabin’s in La Grande Illusion; Lisa Fittko, a passeuse who risked her ...”

“... with Love (1959), an autobiographical account of the hostility and prejudice he encountered as a young schoolteacher in the East End, gets only a fleeting namecheck. And it’s remarkable how few artists and writers are featured. Their inclusion would presumably strike the authors as being too evocative of those cheerful Commission for Racial Equality ...”

“... prophetic books has recently been called into question in a way which has largely confounded Michael Foot’s purpose in writing The History of Mr Wells. It is clear that Foot first conceived his biography as a celebration of Wells’s socialism – more particularly his ‘libertarian’ socialism, which Foot takes to be healthier than the ...”

“... of Lady Cunard (whom he detested), he was now able to launch himself, a successful and unattached young literary lion, into loftier social circles. Mr Amory has edited the letters meticulously. To a letter of July 1931 he appends 31 footnotes identifying those mentioned. They include one future duke, one earl, one younger son of a marquess, one daughter of a ...”

“... I propose to leave the first two out of discussion: The Anthropos-Spectre-Beast, ‘a fantasy for young readers’ that is as hard-edged and adult as everything else of Konwicki’s; and A Dreambook of Our Time, once chosen by Philip Roth for his Penguin series ‘The Other Europe’, but long unobtainable. (My own copy of it has gone missing, but I remember ...”

“... sense of humour. C.P. Snow’s Corridors of Power is a chore to read now, at least as far as the young are concerned. They don’t care very much that it struck a chord among a mandarin élite which was rapidly becoming disillusioned. Nevertheless, in the course of that novel Snow has Lewis Eliot observe usefully: ‘Countries, when their power is slipping ...”

“... into Sonora. The wolf is soon taken from him, as ‘contraband’, as the horse is taken from the young boy in All the Pretty Horses. After being exhibited in a fair, she is set to fight against dogs on a hacienda: wolf-baiting as a sport for the betting man. In a spectacular scene, Billy rescues the wolf from her tormentors, but only at the ...”

“... not only did it do splendidly at the box office, but it also won the endorsement of both the young Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, with Sartre (whose life is strikingly similar to that of Brecht) learning the catchy tunes by heart.’ As an approach, this is about as discriminating as the ducking-stool, and will no doubt draw similar circles of ...”

“... Or are scarcely confessed before they become something else: And soon the whistling will begin. Young men are calling their girls. Standing down there in the cold, they whistle up at the lighted windows of warm rooms where the beds are already turned down for the night. They want to be let in. Their signals echo down the deep hollow street, lascivious and ...”

“... has a country place in San Cristóbal, where he takes, or has brought to him, the compliant young women he needs, and where he is supposed to go that evening. There is plenty of realistic dialogue among the waiting men, and the first of a set of flashbacks. It gives us the story of one of them, telling us how he got here, to this time and place and ...”

“... friend Moreland phrases it. There is also Bill Truscott, tipped for greatness when he was a young man, who turns with age into a stodgy civil servant, and tells the narrator: ‘I never read novels nowadays.’ Perhaps remembering his old reputation for sophistication, or in the narrator’s fussy but very funny phrasing, ‘possibly thinking that ...”

“... offered a seat if the bus or tram were crowded. In London I can never get to a seat in time – a young boy or girl always gets in ahead of me. Now I am back in England and what do I find? The affair of the Falkland Islands is again running in full spate. The Franks Committee had completed its investigations before I returned. It seemed to be high ...”

“... words​ , reminiscent of W.E.B. Du Bois’s ‘double consciousness’, come from Theodor Wonja Michael’s autobiography, Deutsch sein und Schwarz dazu: Erinnerungen eines Afro-Deutschen (2013), translated into English as Black German: An Afro-German Life in the 20th Century. Born in Berlin in 1925, Michael was the ...”