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“... the press’s traditional heartless sensationalism? Though they could, of course, be both. Clive James once cruelly rebuked an Observer subeditor who had sought to sharpen his prose style and improve his jokes with the remark, ‘Listen, if I wrote like that I’d be you.’ Félix Fénéon might be the perfect counter-example: the sub who wrote better than ...”

“... which, as Kenneth Lynn cogently expresses it, is not ‘a haunted Nick Adams, or a crippled Jake Barnes, or a hollowed-out Frederic Henry, but an overbearing know-it-all named Ernest Hemingway’. Max Eastman said Hemingway had false hair on his chest. Gertrude Stein, in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, called his courage into question. Of course, there ...”

“... James Kennaway’s last book, the novella Silence, begins like this:     The doctor thought: I wish I could believe her. I wish I could take her story at face value. I wish I could accept what the Sister had to say. I wish I could say I were a simple man, but none of us can say that any more ... The doctor is in a movie-house which he soon leaves to go to his son-in-law’s club:     On Sunday afternoons, in the wintertime, the club organised concerts ...”

“... Biafra through Kissinger in South Africa (HK to Vorster: ‘I’m only here for De Beers’) via James Goldsmith, Robert Maxwell, Rupert Murdoch, to Mugabe, Bush and Blair. For fans of a pensionable age, Verwoerd’s assassination (‘A Nation Mourns’, 17 September 1966) is a star cover. Younger readers may prefer a ghoulish photo of Norman Tebbit, the ...”

“... the impact on England as a whole of having the Book printed in English. They encountered Robert Barnes, a singularly entrepreneurial supporter of the Reformers’ movement. In the words of a deposition made by one of the Steeple Bumpstead men to the authorities who were hot on the tail of the peddlers of an English Bible, ...”

“... an American Jew who had converted to Christianity but who is now a Sufi. His old girlfriend, Sonia Barnes, a nightclub singer, is a member of the cult, and, like Raziel, a former druggie. Raziel and Sonia have decided that Adam De Kuff, an unstable American Catholic, is the new Messiah, and that ‘the End of Days’ is nigh. De Kuff starts preaching to crowds ...”

“... people’, though mostly important ones: the publisher Marguerite Caetani, Peggy Guggenheim, Djuna Barnes. Figures associated with Proust would sometimes be there – Lily de Gramont, the duchesse de Clermont-Tonnerre, for instance, whom Barney insisted on introducing to Capote (an interest in celebrities was ‘one of her hang-ups’). Many were queer ...”

“... blandness’. Not while Rupert’s still around. And while Rupert’s still around (and Sir James, and Robert, and Tiny – and maybe even Victor: ‘I have the papers in which to give my views, but I think the House of Lords will be better’), reports of the ‘death of the press barons’ are somewhat exaggerated. The British certainly like to give ...”

“... was, by the way, a more serious scholar than Sutherland makes out) and so did the next professor, James Sutherland, another devoted researcher. But after this rather lengthy lapse the old Gower Street concordat between scholarship and journalism was, against some dryasdust opposition, revived, and the most recent incumbents, myself, Karl Miller and John ...”

“... In The Green Knight we have to contend with Lucas and Clement Graffe, Harvey Blacket, Bellamy James and his dog Anax, the Anderson women – Louise and her daughters Alethea (Aleph), Sophia (Sefton) and Moira (Moy) – Emil and Clive and the Adwardens. A reader alert to social differences will find such names far from neutral. An odour of class hangs ...”

“... riven with ideological dispute and internecine factionalism faces electoral disadvantages. As John Barnes brings out in his urbane essay on ideology and factions, Conservative ideology has rested in part on a scepticism about the adequacy of ideology itself. In this sense, neither the fervent Tariff Reformers of the early part of the century, nor the rabid ...”

“... still shocking.In 1922 thousands had gathered to watch the new MPs take the night mail to London. James Maxton, the most charismatic of the group, assured the crowd that ‘they would see the atmosphere of the Clyde getting the better of the House of Commons.’ Maxton and his colleagues were members of the Independent Labour Party (until 1918 you couldn’t ...”

“... and of all its farce, And think of all those books gone down the drain By Amis, Amis, Bainbridge, Barnes, Bragg, Braine ... But artists of all kinds can be excused For cherishing a stratified society. Their privilege, which exists to be abused, Is to lay hold of life in its variety. Granted they do it well, we are amused And readily forgive the note of piety ...”

“... So I stop. But something made me try again, and a few months ago I came home from my local Barnes and Noble with a stack of books about US law enforcement. I now know all about Luminol, Spiral Search Patterns and Bindle Paper. I understand the protocols of Search and Seizure. I’m up on Curtilage and the Exclusionary Rule, I can inform you about the ...”

“... only stacks the shelves higher. After the renewal of the English novel in the 1980s – Amis, Barnes, Ishiguro, Mo, Carter, Rushdie, McEwan – we move into the free-for-all 1990s, in which realism is for sale alongside genre fiction, postmodern fun alongside ladlit. What this history lacks, ironically enough, is a sense of literary history. At one point ...”