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“... Quentin chapter of The Sound and the Fury) obscures the attempt at honest praise of the labour of George Gudger. Why did Agee fluff and pamper this conventional theme of the writer as criminal? The enigmatic figure of Edgar had somehow become for him an image of the suffering artist – the character possibly getting entangled with a memory of Lear’s speech ...”

“... This has allowed the steady growth in power of a class of insiders and experts, first described by Walter Lippmann during the Thirties, whose technical skill and organic affiliations with the power structure gradually insulated them from scrutiny and accountability. It is my impression that whereas the first clandestine operatives as well as their immediate ...”

“... commissioning long disco mixes not from the artists themselves but from DJs like Tom Moulton and Walter Gibbons. Many of the successful DJ remixes in this era were relentlessly percussive, often incorporating salsa or African rhythms. Ironically, the longer mixes were rarely played in full: DJs using two copies of the record would just repeat the percussive ...”

“... which had built up an artificial nature.’ (Another candidate for transformation – he reads Walter Pater – is not so lucky, being despatched by a Mad Mullah on page 140.) Kipling was less sanguine. His early stories show innocence broken rather than transformed, and Britain separated from the British in India by irreconcilable differences of ...”

“... for in this context they know, like older readers on the poetry scene, what is proper to it. But Walter de la Mare’s line ‘Who said, “Peacock Pie”?’ is not just appropriate to a poem for children. It is a real question, just as this, from Stevie Smith, is real information: Cool and plain Cool and plain Was the message of love on the window ...”

“... of local government: the new initiatives to revive the North are strictly London-led, as was George Osborne’s Northern Powerhouse project. The Supreme Court (never to be forgiven for its refutation of Johnson’s prorogation) is to be starved of oxygen by limiting the right to judicial review – ‘a bit of constitutional plumbing’, as the attorney ...”

“... electorate (a requirement inserted into the legislation by a disgruntled Labour backbencher, George Cunningham, a Scot sitting for an English seat), the SNP’s appeal fizzled for the best part of a decade. What happened next, at least according to many of those who were involved, is that Scotland’s artists and writers stepped into the breach as the ...”

“... and a burglar, Thomas Mason (‘alias Humming Tom’), who had broken into the house of Sir Walter Cope. There was the woman from Finsbury accused of ‘cozening Elizabeth Barnes of certain money for a little powder in a paper’: she had promised that Elizabeth ‘should have her purpose of musicon by carryenge the powder about her’, apparently ...”

“... and inventions we associate with the late 19th century, with Dostoevsky and James, George Eliot and Pontoppidan; those drew on the openings and possibilities of a competitive capitalism, in which robber barons and monopolies signified an expansion of individual and collective power. This American version, in the late 20th century, signifies ...”

“... largely by technological possibilities. From the mid-1970s, Frederick Sanger at Cambridge and Walter Gilbert at Harvard had developed ways of working out the nucleotide sequence of particular genes – ‘reading their code’ – and at NINDS Venter adapted those methods, slow and laborious as they then were, to determine the sequence of the adrenaline ...”

“... a sharp word for a daughter-in-law who serves cockroaches as a delicacy.’ He quotes a scene from Walter Scott’s The Antiquary, in which the old mendicant factotum Edie Ochiltree is given qualified access to a moment of celebration: ‘A table was quickly covered in the parlour, where the party sat joyously down to some refreshment. At the request of ...”

“... He recognised us, but he couldn’t speak. Hugh was reading J.G. Lockhart’s Memoirs of Sir Walter Scott; a straw bookmark showed that he was halfway into Volume II. He had read Lockhart before: he had read all of Scott several times since he was a child. The lives of writers were one of his major preoccupations: this biography, written by Scott’s ...”

“... Arab armies had a clear advantage in terms of weaponry. Even the CIA and the US Secretary of State George Marshall predicted Jewish defeat. Without a secret Czech arms deal, Israel would probably not have survived. After fighting for a year, it had lost 1 per cent of its population. Yet the Nazi Holocaust did not become a focus of American Jewish life in ...”

“... grew out of all of these energies.It was prompted by a pamphlet, originally a lecture, by Walter Besant, which made the case for storytelling as a great art, as beguiling in its deployment of technique as painting and as harmonious in its own way as music. James was fine with that, but took exception to the notion that literature should have ‘a ...”

“... to get better throughout two-thirds of a lifetime?’ This was the man, a novice to movies, whom George Schaefer brought to RKO in 1939: a household name, a radical in politics as in theatre and radio, an iconoclast, a cultivated bon-viveur, a wise old man, a baby, a sophisticate, a tearaway – above all, an intellectual. He was entering a community, noted ...”