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“... their off-screen life. For vulgarity, you need to go to the much more crumpled and ‘adult’ Mel Gibson or Bruce Willis, both of whom still make movies. So aside from representing the all-male reluctant hero in the good movies he made, what was so special about Bogart? Even Kanfer doesn’t think he had much range as an actor. With the right director and ...”

“... would not be permitted to contest the next election: three of them are going quietly, but Ian Gibson, who still has the backing of his local party, protested loudly and with some justification. As someone remarked, in his case it looks like a contract killing of someone who was a thorn in the side of the regime.  A chat with a prominent economic ...”

“... the shop talk of the cluster of film pioneers – Allan Dwan, Lillian Gish, King Vidor, Hoot Gibson, Edith Head – who remember Hollywood as ‘a virtual wilderness’, when Sunset Boulevard was unpaved and pictures were called ‘galloping tintypes’. In those carefree early years, Hollywood was an Eden of enterprise: innocent, full of fun and ...”

“... with his digital fantasias, doing the same kind of thing – if in a classier way – as William Gibson in Neuromancer, or David Cronenburg in Existenz, or the Wachowski brothers in The Matrix? And, if so, do we really want our novelists and fabulists of digitation to be classy? Is fiction which takes on science the ...”

“... with the ferocity of Ford’s detractors (they seem to close their eyes to watch his films), but David Thomson makes a mighty-seeming case against him in his Biographical Dictionary of the Cinema. From the 1975 edition: Ford’s male chauvinism believes in uniforms, drunken candour, fresh-faced little women (though never sexuality), a gallery of supporting ...”

“... When I was 12, I read a story by J.G. Ballard about a boy who has lived all his life in a vast city. One day, he decides to take a train out of the metropolis, to find a wide open space where he can fly a kite. But after many days on the train, he starts to recognise landmarks from the window that he has seen earlier in the journey: he has travelled all the way around the world without leaving the city ...”

“... Slessor’s good works on the Upper Niger still earn her an image on Scottish banknotes, while David Livingstone became the world’s best-known Scotsman. They did not save many souls. After 50 years’ work in India, the missions could show only 3359 converts. But their influence on empire was deep and paradoxical, at once the advance guard of colonialism ...”

“... among others, Shaw, Amy Johnson, Roosevelt (F.D.), Henry Ford, Asquith, Charlie Chaplin, J.M. Barrie, Churchill, Henry James, Edith Wharton, kings and queens and Mahatma Gandhi. The Archduke Franz Ferdinand spent a weekend there not long before his assassination. By the 1930s, the guest list – both at Cliveden and in St James’s Square – had ...”

“... authority, few rivals outside the work of DeLillo, Pynchon and (more to his own taste) William Gibson. And, as in their novels, local observation in Jameson was complemented by an implacable awareness of what he called the ‘unrepresentable exterior’ enclosing all the slick and streaming phenomena in view. In the novelists, however, allusion to the ...”

“... the rebellious, rebellion was still an individual, not a corporate activity; not the rebel as Mel-Gibson-as-William-Wallace plus army, but the rebel as Sid Vicious or David Bowie. For many Scots, self-determination, rather than nationalism, remains the cause. Now, 35 years later, were I living in Scotland, I’d vote yes to ...”

“... island – the freest and fairest in Singaporean history – which made the Labour Front leader, David Marshall, head of the local advisory board of what remained a British colony. The son of Sephardic Baghdadis, Marshall had been a Japanese POW in the mines of Hokkaido, and had Fabian connections in London. He proposed the creation of a welfare state and ...”

“... of white women.’Black feminists weren’t the only ones to take offence. In 1986 the novelist David Bradley confessed that the first time he read Native Son,I shed no tears for Bigger. I wanted him dead; by legal means if possible, by lynching if necessary … I did not see Bigger Thomas as a symbol of any kind of black man. To me he was a sociopath, pure ...”

“... waving cushions and towels, and some were leaning out. It happened that one of the firefighters, David Badillo, knew two of the uncles, Carlos and Manfred Ruiz, from the sports centre – they had all worked there as lifeguards – and Melanie gave Badillo her keys to their flat, 176 on the 20th floor. (They still hadn’t heard from Jessica.) Badillo went ...”