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“... the popular version of Scottish history that once flourished in pubs and school playgrounds, Henry Bell invented steam navigation when the Comet began its regular voyages between Glasgow, Greenock and Helensburgh in the summer of Napoleon’s advance on Moscow. In fact, Robert Fulton’s steamboat Clermont had started running on the Hudson in 1807, and in the ...”

“... The Wright Brothers were heavily researched even before the recent centenary. In his preface, Ian Mackersey mentions that there are more than a hundred other books on them, and a host of ancillary volumes ‘affectionately devoted to such specifics as their bicycle business, the life of their mechanic . . . and the recipes of the meals they ...”

“... terrorism in order ‘to protect the mainland’. McCartney has campaigned vociferously with Ian Paisley and Peter Robinson against the Agreement – in April, at the launch of the United Unionist campaign, he gave the clenched fist salute – and though most people regard him as a provincial politician, his policy of trying to make Northern Ireland ...”

“... at least officially, was also conquered by oralism (whose American colonel was Alexander Graham Bell, a Scot brought up on the Edinburgh methods). Sign was seen as an escape for the deaf, a way in which they might get along if they refused to integrate themselves in the speaking world. There was plenty of ideology in the triumph of oralism (you can quickly ...”

“... of merely human time, each night’s feeble apocalypse: that dire moment when the ring-a-ding bell must be wrapped in cotton wool and stowed away. Then came the risky, occluded territory of sleep. Sinatra seems to have shared a pathology with Kingsley Amis: a fear of the shadows at the end of the night-time tunnel. What was hiding there he was so ...”

“... word for a change – wrong. Now consider a more sophisticated version of the Robinson technique. Ian Hamilton, noted biographer of Robert Lowell, writes to J.D. Salinger and informs him that he has become Hamilton’s latest subject: would the notoriously reclusive novelist mind answering some questions, could he take a visit? Hamilton doesn’t expect an ...”

“... and Gentlemen. It is a scene Feigel might have quoted at more length, in which Guy Crouchback and Ian Kilbannock stand in Piccadilly during an air-raid, arguing about whether the night sky, riven with fire and the beams of searchlights, is more like a Turner or a John Martin. Further down St James’s Street, on the opposite pavement from where a club that is ...”

“... the famous seizing of the handbell on the Conference podium: reciting Donne, he declared that the bell was tolling for the Labour Party and brought an audience of four thousand to their feet. (He was so pleased with the effect that he gave a repeat performance at Blackpool the following year.) Over time the image of Hogg and the ...”

“... Moore, whose ‘Four Quartz Crystal Clocks’, taking as its setting the US Naval Observatory and Bell Telephone Laboratory Time Vault, is a plea for punctuality and punctiliousness:     The lemur-student can see       that an aye-aye is not an angwan-tibo, potto or loris. Amy Clampitt can probably tell an aye-aye from an angwan-tibo and might ...”

“... Ian McEwan’s vividly and meticulously imagined novels often focus on characters whose imaginations are either unwholesomely vivid or dryly meticulous. At one end of the spectrum lurk the sex murderers in The Comfort of Strangers (1981), Robert and Caroline, whose actions lead their victim’s girlfriend to surmise that ‘the imagination, the sexual imagination’, embodies ‘a powerful single organising principle’ which distorts ‘all relations, all truth ...”

“... for novelists to acknowledge their sources. At the beginning of The Child in Time, for example, Ian McEwan lists Christina Hardyment’s Dream Babies, David Bohm’s Wholeness and the Implicate Order and Joseph Chilton Pearce’s Magical Child. In Time’s Arrow, Martin Amis acknowledges, among a number of others, Robert Jay Lifton’s The Nazi ...”

“... business or style of the Buildings of England to offer comment, let alone to be waspish, the late Ian Nairn got away with a fair share of oblique outrage in Surrey and Sussex. But Bettley does the job neatly: he can’t find a castle at all. ‘Destroyed 1215 and not rebuilt,’ he writes. Architectural tourists need not waste their time there. But in ...”

“... above the lip – this explains the philtrum – and wipes its mind clean. The unborn narrator of Ian McEwan’s new novel, Nutshell, isn’t omniscient but has formidable mental powers, able to analyse, synthesise and, necessarily, use language. He also has tastes, preferences, opinions, all of which logically depend on something he hasn’t ...”

“... about its audiences, buildings, distributors and publicists as it is about the films themselves. Ian Christie notes in The Last Machine (1994) that until around 1907 people didn’t visit the cinema with the idea of seeing a particular film. Audiences were captivated by the novelty of moving pictures: a baby having breakfast, a train arriving at a station, a ...”

“... appropriate than was perhaps intentional. Mr Kalugin looked as if he had been dreamed up in an Ian Fleming nightmare. His idea of light conversation, since I decided to ask him about some of the books under review, was to hint that he could say a lot if he chose. ‘Your Kim Philby ... ha, ha, ha, that’s quite another story ... Yuri Modin ...”