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“... She smiled. ‘Too young,’ she said; then she carried her crockery to the table by the serving hatch, set it down and disappeared. I knew where she was going and I could have followed her, but I didn’t. In some dim corner of my mind, I understood her and it occurred to me that I hadn’t really wanted to ask her out, it was just that I didn’t know what ...”

“... of his own disappearance into fiction. As he watches the rehearsals for I Am a Camera, the play John van Druten made from the Isherwood material, Isherwood thinks a good deal – sometimes comically, sometimes sentimentally – about the relation of art to life. In writing Goodbye to Berlin I destroyed a certain portion of my real past. I did this ...”

“... by a Thai Communist hit squad in Bangkok later that year. How much​ did the British know? John Davis, the Force 136 man who was closest to Chin Peng, Lai Tek’s successor as MCP leader, had been in the prewar Special Branch. He knew the secret of Mr Wright, but did not tell his comrade. Anyway, the end of the war brought a new situation. In Indochina ...”

“... was in Soho Square. Someone said it had the atmosphere of a schooner, the master bawling down the hatch-way: ‘Below there ...’ That veteran courtier Tommy Lascelles was probably nearer the mark in once observing almost to himself: ‘Rupert’s more like a Life Guards officer than a publisher.’ The firm, if not run single-handed, was not far from ...”

“... According to John Cheever, 1948 was ‘the year everybody in the United States was worried about homosexuality’. And nobody was more worried than the federal government, which was rumoured to be teeming with gays and lesbians. One might think that Washington’s attentions would have been focused elsewhere – on the Soviet Union, for example, or on Communist spies – but in 1950, President Truman’s advisers warned him that ‘the country is more concerned about the charges of homosexuals in the government than about Communists ...”

“... Spark seems to have lost interest in T.S. Eliot from that point on. Her edition of the letters of John Henry Newman, however, went ahead as planned. And her interest in Job and his dreadful afflictions, the capricious God who made him suffer dreadfully for the sake of a wager, and his horrible friends who only made things worse, she displaced, with a ...”

“... classed his enormous erudite books among the many that he refused on principle to read. John Evelyn, visiting Rome in 1644, was impressed when ‘with Dutch patience, he showed us his perpetual motions, catoptrics, magnetical experiments, models, and a thousand other crotchets and devices.’ He predicted that in a forthcoming book on obelisks ...”

“... just such a helmet looking as if he might be coming off duty from the foot of the Cross.25 July. John Schlesinger dies. The obituaries are more measured than he would have liked, the many undistinguished films he made later in life set against A Kind of Loving and Sunday, Bloody Sunday. He wasn’t by nature a journeyman film-maker taking whatever came ...”

“... of how a degree-less provincial could match university-educated courtly playwrights such as John Lyly at their own game. The other writer, however, dealt with French current affairs and the social position of education in a different manner: GUISE: My Lord of Anjou, there are a hundred Protestants Which we have chased into the river Seine That swim ...”

“... Smith Institute for the Criminally Insane, banging the same drum in the Independent. Not long ago John Bird and John Fortune did a sketch about the privatisation of air. These days it scarcely seems unthinkable. 28 February. There have been football riots in Bruges, where Chelsea have been playing, with, responsible for ...”

“... seen at first sight’ was another of his aphorisms, one that he borrowed from Gotthold Lessing or John Opie, magpie that he was. ‘Every glance is a glance for study,’ he also said. The scene in Rain, Steam and Speed is of an imminent death, the instant of an action caught by a glance. A train rushes across a bridge and is bearing down on a hare that’s ...”

“... wall in King’s Cross Station. Anna’s father reckoned that the Hadmans were related to the poet John Clare, who came from Helpston, a village near their own. Our investigation drew many previously unknown Hadmans from the ground where they had lain, undisturbed, for hundreds of years. They were known to each other, some of them, but unknown to us: lives ...”

“... two daughters to a flat near the British Legation in Bucharest. Everybody was taking precautions. John Treacy, the owner of an oil-well supply business, and his wife, Esther, had moved bedrooms after an incendiary bomb was thrown through their window, and slept with a loaded service revolver on the bedside table. Percy Clark had taken a room at the Athénée ...”

“... surveillance helicopters take off, is closer still to Matthew Allen’s High Beach Asylum where John Clare, distracted by agricultural enclosures, was lodged. But it was the launcher site in Oxleas Wood, where locals had fought hard (and successfully) against motorway incursions, that I wanted to inspect. Leaning on his stick, Steve was waiting at North ...”

“... the Mormons: when Moon was jailed for tax evasion his most energetic defenders were Senator Orrin Hatch (Utah) and Congressman George Hansen (Idaho), both Mormons. Jerry Falwell, the Moral Majority leader, joined in the Moonie chorus that Moon’s imprisonment was a violation of religious liberty. Congressmen and Senators were bombarded with offers of free ...”