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“... the dress was so successful because it was strict and yet curve-friendly, making it easy to look nice in. It had in it a tension and a contradiction. The cleverness of the tailoring, the 3D precision of the darts and seaming, always makes me think about the concave angles they use when designing stealth weaponry, except that in the case of the Mouret ...”

“... of Windsor, as soundproof as the walls of all those castles they processed around. Who knew of David Windsor’s dereliction of duty in favour of love (or whatever it was) until a week before the Abdication? Well, quite a lot of people actually, but not the readers of the popular (as in lower orders) press. Marion Crawford, governess to Lilibet and ...”

“... half a million workers in previously safe occupational schemes? Or was it the bizarre spectacle of nice Mr Major mounting his soapbox to speak up, as he put it, for the ‘have-nots’ – meaning, presumably, the income-supported poor, struggling to survive on slashed benefits or without trade unions in insecure jobs, whom Major’s ministers, and many of his ...”

“... Scottish or Welsh devolution, or the failed referendums in Denmark on Maastricht and Ireland on Nice prevented those treaties from being ratified when the people were given time to reconsider their verdicts. In 1955 the Swedish people were asked by their Government in a referendum whether they wanted to continue driving on the left, or whether they would be ...”

“... ploy; and it could work. Trump told Zelensky the US had been very good to Ukraine, and it would be nice if he got a ‘favour’ in return – Roy Cohn’s mother taught Roy the concept of ‘the favour bank’ and it seems to have been passed on to Trump. The thing he wanted was help with his own effort to find out information about former Vice President ...”

“... writers are only thinly present as physical and emotional beings – Louis the historian and nice old gent, randy Lynda, her husband Richard with his withered arm, Ruth who specialises in prison documentaries. This supporting cast rarely interact in their own right and are brought on mainly to bitch at each other during the dreaded Meetings. At one of ...”

“... and with more wit than sense.’ The actor offers no comment, but by now he doesn’t need to. David Gates, the creator of these connoisseurs of disappointment and self-sabotage, published his first novel, Jernigan, in 1991. Joseph Heller called it a ‘sizzler’ and Michiko Kakutani announced in the New York Times that Gates had ‘established himself as ...”

“... a fungoid growth or eruption used as an image for the progress of love. A civil servant called David, his grey hair dyed, has come to visit his ex-wife, Stella: he brings with him his new partner, Catherine, but he is already sick of her and obsessed with a third woman, the pleasingly trollopy Dina. David accompanies ...”

“... Prévert, if he had one, would ‘kill it on the spot’. Breton asks him: ‘Why? If he was nice?’ Prévert replies: ‘he wouldn’t have time to be nice, I’d kill him before he had the chance.’ And so forth. Breton says: ‘If it ever happened to me despite everything, I would make sure I never met the ...”

“... One evening in December 1975 David Plante called on his friend, the novelist Jean Rhys, who was staying in a hotel in South Kensington: ‘a big dreary hotel’, she said, ‘filled with old people whom they won’t allow to drink sweet vermouth’. She was sitting in what the receptionist called ‘the pink lounge’, wearing a pink hat ...”

“... outstripped anyone’s claim to possess their own story. Here he is writing to his oldest friend, David Peltz, who is thinly fictionalised as Woody Selbst in the story ‘A Silver Dish’ and as George Swiebel in Humboldt’s Gift. ‘What matters,’ Bellow wrote to Peltz when he complained of being used, is that good things get written … We’ve known ...”

“... it is for us to examine – as the genuine diary, covering the years 1930 to 1939, of a certain David Peterley, scion of an ancient landed family. Peterley’s diary and other papers, so ran the Foreword by its ‘editor’ Richard Pennington, occupy a large red box in the McGill University Library, of which Pennington was the chief librarian, and the diary ...”

“... here and how might an author guard against its perils? Few writers are as well qualified as David Lodge both to diagnose and to overcome these potential difficulties. One of the leading critics and literary theorists of the past few decades, he has interested himself above all in the mechanics of narration: both the nuts and bolts of expository ...”

“... shove it into my own prose regardless of how tiresome that is. Take my last book, on the satirist David Sedaris. Not only do you get more Proust than you’d ever care for, you get an awful lot of Sedaris – pure, unadulterated Sedaris. It’s not that I’m lazy. Or rather, it’s not just that I’m lazy. I do much more in Sedaris than quote Sedaris, much ...”

“... is composed in a language that is joyfully, gratefully taken over from that of Matisses done in Nice between 1919 and 1924: we are reminded of the Odalisque with Magnolias, for instance, even by the way in which the garden in the background is turned into a decorative screen, while the flanking shutters, not at all a Picassian device, are an evocation of ...”