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“... demonstrate, he was also a maverick member of the wider cultural world. He chaired the Booker judges (ensuring that Hôtel du Lac prevailed over Empire of the Sun, and relishing the ensuing howls). He wrote for the broadsheets; he featured in and fed material to Private Eye. Introduced in his youth to Fitzrovia, he knew Dylan Thomas, Louis MacNeice ...”

“... Ackroyd’s new novel has been caught in the Gadarene rush of fiction brought out in time for the Booker Prize deadline. It won’t be lost in this year’s profusion of titles, and it won’t be harmed by the published assurance of a colleague of his on the Times that it is ‘a sure contender’ for the prize. But it will also have to contend for the ...”

“... of blues records. A brief affair with the daughter of the champion of the English Revolution, Christopher Hill, Master of Balliol. The interestingly named Fanny Hill was also involved, at this period, with Raymond Carr, Warden of St Antony’s College, which Marks describes as the ‘CIA’s Oxford annexe’. The property that the postgraduate Marks ...”

“... as odd that Mai Jia carried off the Mao Dun Prize for Literature in 2008, a little like the Man Booker going to Dan Brown. Mai Jia is a genre novelist, whose books have sold several million copies in China, and an assiduous self-publicist. When Mai Jia’s publisher told the press he would pay an advance of ten million yuan for his new novel, Whisper of the ...”

“... won prestigious awards by the armful: she was recently nominated for the first International Man Booker Prize for career achievement, alongside Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, Gabriel García Márquez, Margaret Atwood et al. Consequently, it is sometimes seen as surprising that she is so little read in Britain. Her formidable essays have been published and admired ...”

“... of how astrological literature was used to promote and disseminate radical social ideas. John Booker, appointed licenser of astrological books by Parliament in 1643, penned almanacs full of bloodthirsty prophesies about the fate of Royalists and Catholics. Another fanatical anti-Royalist was Nicholas Culpeper – author of the famous Herbal (1653) – who ...”

“... revenge novel (revenge on ‘females’ generally), and then in 1986 The Old Devils, which won the Booker Prize. Leader alerts us to the Larkinian echoes in this book, from its title onwards (‘The Old Fools’, one of his most unsparing poems); Larkin’s emotional and imaginative presence seems to have been a feature of much of Amis’s best work. Amis’s ...”

“... models sometimes recognised themselves. Not all were weird or wild: I was surprised to read that Christopher Morris, later a friendly colleague of mine, correctly identified himself and his wife as the ‘darling dodos’ of the excellent story that provided the title of Wilson’s second volume. This account of him inevitably raises the question why, with ...”

“... and institutional (or both, in the case of Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty, which won the Booker Prize). At the same time the market for literary fiction has shrunk, and writers who were perhaps thrilled when bookshops began to have Gay and Lesbian sections were soon dismayed to find that their own books were filed there in a niche or annexe, rather ...”

“... for the reason such an alien artefact, along with Edmund White’s The Beautiful Room Is Empty and Christopher Isherwood’s A Single Man, could speak to him, namely that the sudden scope given to the truth-telling urge in ‘the Eastern homosphere’ – whatever that is – has lent energy and accuracy to these artists’ nonsexual observations as well, as ...”

“... kind of falling away. (The gain is obvious enough and thus less interesting to analyse.) I asked Christopher Hitchens, long before he was terminally ill, where he would go if he had only a few weeks to live. Would he stay in America? ‘No, I’d go to Dartmoor, without a doubt,’ he told me. It was the landscape of his childhood. Dartmoor, not the MD ...”

“... asked by the hero’s older brother in Douglas Stuart’s Shuggie Bain, worthy winner of the 2020 Booker Prize, and it is just as much the preoccupation of his follow-up, Young Mungo, as shown by the new novel’s dedication: ‘For Alexander and all the gentle sons of Glasgow’. The worlds of the books are continuous – deprived Glasgow and its environs in ...”

“... I listen to BBC7’s This Sceptred Isle, a history of England read by Anna Massey, Peter Jeffrey, Christopher Lee and Paul Eddington. Afterwards I take the tray back downstairs to get my midday pills: two Omega 3 tablets, one selenium and one Saw palmetto plus a piece of dark chocolate and a cup of green tea. It probably sounds nicer than I actually find ...”

“... before she, and publishing in general, were ‘comprehensively Virago-ed’, to borrow her friend Christopher Frayling’s not entirely approving phrase. A 1976 edition of Fireworks has a naked white man clutching at the breast of a naked black woman, the woman chained by the throat to the man’s spiky helmet. She also has what looks like a yellow octopus ...”