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“... enraged if a single word is uttered to acknowledge the act. The mad scramble to pull socks onto Gordon, who was otherwise dressed to the nines – in his funeral casket. And the sewer rat that crept out of the commode to chew off the testicles of some day-dreaming old man. Any lingering Falwellian prejudice evaporates in the living rooms of the families who ...”

“... road with his golf club in a shamefully ludicrous way. At Llanstephan on the coast there is Uncle Williams whose lower jaw was shot away during World War One: he wears a mask with a tube protruding from his right nostril to be fixed behind his ear, and down this tube Auntie Williams gently pours gruel to feed him, while she ...”

“... a major work that would seem tailor-made for her thesis, such as Poe’s Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, her command of Scottish and American fiction is sure and precise, and the parallels she draws between Calvinistic and provincial thinking are, with few exceptions, just. But are these resemblances aetiologically significant? Do they show puritanism to ...”

“... talentless, overrated, or simply wankers: Oasis, the Stones, Paul McCartney, John Lennon, Robbie Williams, Kingsley Amis, Martin Amis, Evelyn Waugh, Auberon Waugh, Salman Rushdie, Jeffrey Archer, Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, William Shakespeare (although to be fair they despise the comedies and some of the history plays ...”

“... it so good.’ 7. Edward Heath gave his word to ‘cut rising prices at a stroke’. 8. Shirley Williams joined Arthur Scargill on a mass picket at Grunwicks. 9. James Callaghan said: ‘Crisis? What crisis?’ 10. An experienced cabinet minister said in an interview: ‘I’m not against giving up sovereignty in principle, but not to this lot. You might ...”

“... parties as the nadir of postwar Britain. David Cameron (though it could just as easily have been Gordon Brown) read out the charge sheet at a Demos meeting in 2006: ‘economic decline . . . inflation, stagnation and rising unemployment . . . deteriorating industrial relations’. Nearly 30 million working days were lost to strikes in 1979, mainly during ...”

“... a letter from mother of stale news she’d already relayed over the phone, a card from Oscar Williams inviting us to a cocktail party in New York on the impossible last day of my classes. No news.’ In late 1959, waiting for short story acceptances that would not come, she wrote in her journal: ‘Must not wait for mail as it ruins the day.’ Then the ...”

“... have been spilled’), he told them that he ‘was going up on deck to see the fun’. Lucy Duff Gordon, a fashionable dress designer, whose life, together with that of her sister Elinor Glyn, is told in the second of these books, was on her way to New York with her husband, a Scotch baronet, and her secretary. She heard people running along the deck outside ...”

“... found nothing but shame and ruin, polluted affections, and an early grave. The eponymous Eric, or Williams to his classmates, the spirited son of a missionary, discusses the unspeakable vice with Edwin Russell, Roslyn’s paladin sans reproche. ‘My father said it was the most fatal curse which could ever become rife in a public school,’ Russell says. It ...”

“... Grimm, the poems of John Keats (to make an educated guess). He was also a great fan of Caroline Gordon, all of whose novels he hungrily read, and was perplexed throughout his life that not everyone else had done so. ‘The pure products of America go crazy,’ William Carlos Williams wrote. Sometimes, they are simply ...”

“... bites my hand. As I read this scene, and others like it, I found myself thinking of William Carlos Williams’s story ‘The Use of Force’, in which a country doctor attempts to examine a young girl’s throat, checking for diphtheria. She resists; he forces her. There’s no question of the necessity of the examination: the child has a potentially fatal ...”

“... as Bohemia, refuge from a socially repressive and aggressively snobbish age. Ella Gwendoline Rees Williams, as she began, was born in Dominica in a plantation family which had seen better days but with good connections, returning to England for public school and careers in banking or the Army. Jean’s brothers frequently, if disapprovingly, bailed her out in ...”

“... Bill’ Sutherland, had a reputation every bit as evil as that of Alastair Campbell or Gordon Brown’s frightful pair, Charlie Whelan and Damian ‘McPoison’ McBride. Nor was it always the PM’s press spokesmen who dripped the poison. At the time of Suez, Eden’s spokesman, William Clark, was startled to get a call from the Tory ...”

“... with 20th Century Fox negotiated by my expert lawyer, Alan U. Schwartz, who represented Tennessee Williams, Tom Stoppard, Truman Capote and Mel Brooks. ‘May the Schwartz be with you,’ Brooks joked in Spaceballs. He already was.As the plane began its descent, swinging over Santa Clarita, down across the Santa Monica Mountains, then banking briefly over the ...”

“... were met over and over again with an excessive response. From the execution of George William Gordon, a member of the Jamaican National Assembly, for allegedly inciting the 1865 rebellion at Morant Bay, to the conviction for conspiracy of the Meerut defendants in India in 1933 for organising a railway strike, the dynamic of rebellion and repression ...”