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“... the books, starting with the choice of locale. First Friends is a narrative bound together by Ronald Blythe out of a trove of letters sent between the Nashes and Carrington, and discovered in a trunk in a bread-oven after John’s death. Blythe edits deftly and writes at once intimately and with a feel for the broad historical pulse, and the text is ...”

“... spend the rest of the book trying to reconcile herself to her marital duty. In 1925, Heyer married Ronald Rougier, a mining engineer whom she had known for several years. Born in Odessa where his father worked as a shipbroker, he apparently spoke Russian, liked caviar and didn’t at all share her views on Russian literature. Kloester tries to tackle the ...”

“... taken this message to heart in their current ad shown on British children’s TV in the mornings. Ronald McDonald is wandering round a family home in full clown gear, telling the children that they should love their mother. To the tune of the Crystals’ hit, the bright-eyed cherubs chant back: ‘We do Ron Ron Ron, we do Ron Ron!’ There is no mention of ...”

“... R.C. Church. They were just round the corner from Sam’s parents, who lived in a tenement on Ronald Street that was being prepared for demolition. There were twelve Samson children and they filled the cobbled streets around them with their games and dramas. When they got fed up, or when it got too cold outside, they would do what their oldest ...”

“... politics, the rhetoric of war and wartime mobilisation is commonplace. American advocates of the Green New Deal called for a repeat of the staggering industrial production achieved during the Second World War. In the UK, memories of the postwar welfare state persist. There is talk of the Marshall Plan.But isn’t this all rather too convenient? A ‘good ...”

“... Len Hutton in his prime, captained a team called the Gaieties XI. Simon Gray, David Hare and Ronald Harwood are or were known to be keen on the game, too. And Tom Stoppard, another follower, has a striking set-piece in The Real Thing in which a playwright, explaining dramatic technique, says: ‘What we’re trying to do is to write cricket bats.’ If ...”

“... the scandals lifted in turn by Wills from sources such as Joan and Clay Blair’s The Search for J.F.K. To be sure, the bits are juicy: Joe Kennedy propositioning his sons’ girlfriends and introducing Gloria Swanson into his household as if she were a maiden aunt rather than his mistress; Arthur Krock, eminent pundit, first procuring girls for the Kennedy ...”

“... was at least abashed when his nakedness was pointed out: Dr Rowse seems shameless. ‘To/President Ronald Reagan’, his book begins, ‘for his professional appreciation/of/William Shakespeare’. (Was Reagan wise to garnish Rowse’s text? What if the Dark Lady becomes an election issue, with Emilia v. Ms Elgar, the Italian against the black ...”

“... William Saroyan. Wolfe, later to become a successful television comedy writer in partnership with Ronald Chesney, urged Story to get hold of Saroyan’s latest collection of stories, Dear Baby. He did so, and was bowled over. According to Darwent – also a Saroyan enthusiast – until he read Saroyan Story had thought it necessary to imitate ‘standard ...”

“... but are simply offering something to hold onto. In his Introduction Richard Cobb pays tribute to Ronald Blythe, author of Akenfield; and it seems as if East Anglia, Essex in particular, has a special place in the re-creation of Lost Things and the rites that accompanied them. The Fleming brothers, who had a good deal in common with the phantom Bagshaw and ...”

“... a name exotic or absurd, half old-time Jewish and half Hollywood – Shenandoah Fish, Hershey Green, Cornelius Schmidt. In his best verse play, Shenandoah, he even features himself looking back on his own naming ceremony twenty-five years earlier. When his mother, Elsie Fish, decides on Shenandoah, he breaks out Macbeth-like: Now it is done and quickly ...”

“... pursue prosperity alongside security. Labour had already promised to invest £28 billion a year in green industries, though Reeves has since backtracked on this, stating instead that investment would gradually rise to that level.The sudden vogue for industrial policy has drawn criticism from some on the left, suspicious of public money being channelled towards ...”

“... rules for writing detective stories are laid down by Aristotle in the Poetics. Similarly, Ronald Knox held that, from prooimion to epilogos, such stories ought to be constructed on the model of Greek tragedy. There is something to be said for these learned thoughts. Aristotle declares that we, as children do, delight in imitation. If we reflect that ...”

“... sexual indignities’ including bondage, beating and voyeurism. Scott’s friend Peter Green said that a scene omitted from another novel of a man making love to a tongueless girl was ‘a fantasy, a paradigm ... of what Paul thought a woman should be’. And James Leasor, who was with him in India during the war, immediately identified Scott with ...”

“... in Gerhardie. That was partly the trouble: he was, but he made his reputation as an exotic. Unlike Ronald Firbank, who had his own niche as a homosexual and a rare stylistic innovator, Gerhardie could not in the end claim to be anything specially, not even an eccentric. Although he had a close and life-long relationship with his mother Clara, his own tastes ...”