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“... paragraph of Scarlett Thomas’s ‘Mind Control’, the story that starts the collection: Mark got his Dreamcast five minutes before he died. His mother wanted it buried with him. The story is narrated by Mark’s girlfriend, who is living with his parents, and acting as a nursemaid-cum-housekeeper to both of ...”

“... for a marriage of any member of the family who was younger than 25. After the quarter-century mark had been reached, things became simpler. All that was required was the consent of the British and Dominion Parliaments. But the year was 1953, and there was a Coronation on the way, and Canon 107 of the Church of England’s 1603 doctrines expressly forbade ...”

“... TNT,’ Leijten said. ‘The postal system is sick.’ On the eve of my journey to Holland, David Simpson, the earnest Ulsterman who is Royal Mail’s chief spokesman, took me to one of the facilities the company is most proud of, the Gatwick mail centre in Sussex. Despite its name, it has nothing to do with the nearby airport. It’s a giant mail processing ...”

“... instead inhale the anonymous yet fiercely intimate odour of the crowd. The protagonist of Howard Simpson’s Vietnam spy novel, Someone Else’s War (2003), has information to gather. He makes a call. ‘The phone booth smelled of urine; someone had spat generously on the floor and a loud argument in Cantonese was going on at the stamp counter.’ Booths ...”

“... Anthony Eden and put him down on paper as Harry Wharton. (In fact, this isn’t too wide of the mark. Charles Hamilton has left a record of how he went about the business of assembling his characters, picking up a podgy frame here, a pair of loud trousers there.) The author of But for Bunter, indeed, has a lot of fun selecting later celebrities with whom to ...”

“... out to be no different from a load of others, and the faint but as yet untested hope that since no mark has yet been made his horizons are unlimited. There’s some anxiety in the syntax too, in the halting comma-laden first sentence, as though each step is a great labour. A few pages later we learn that Dwight, Quito-bound, knows no Spanish: ‘I guess I’d ...”

“... would be Newt Gingrich of Georgia. Sounded like a redneck to me, and a wondrous name withal. (Mark Stamaty, best of Washington cartoonists, took to calling him ‘Congressman Hoot Salamander’.) I didn’t do much prep. As usual, the proceedings opened with the charge that I was ignorant of the lessons of Munich. Generally, the other side didn’t know ...”

“... and Anne Boleyn’s uncle, the Duke of Norfolk. Arrests took place in the first week of May: of Mark Smeaton, a court musician, and a number of gentlemen close to the king. George Boleyn was one of them. Along with the queen, the suspects were sent to the Tower, and a trial process set in motion. In the end, five men, including George, were charged with ...”

“... Married, happily it would seem, for five years to Eileen Mulligan (who 35 years later, as Eileen Simpson, now a psychologist, would write Poets in Their Youth, easily the most clear-eyed, intelligent and compassionate record of what it’s like to live with and among poets), he had begun an affair, the first since his marriage, with the wife of a young ...”

“... she had been unfaithful to Cleary, who was often away at Clonmel. One possible lover was William Simpson, a man hated by many locals because he worked as a ‘heavy’ for the landlord. Bridget, always a defiant individualist, did his shopping when local grocers refused to serve him. (This may have helped the couple to secure the house from the ...”

“... battlements. For most, however, the preference was some form of Classicism, which was seen as the mark of a gentleman. French Classicism, in variable forms, was the choice of the super-rich, such as the Rothschilds at Waddesdon, Mentmore and Tring; but Château Impney in Worcestershire showed what a relatively humble salt manufacturer could do when bitten by ...”

“... Preface, anyone seriously studying it (or for that matter the 1800 edition) will miss footnotes to mark where material was added in 1802. Two new critical books illustrate the range and diversity of present historical work on Wordsworth and Coleridge. Susan Eilenberg goes into the deep relationship between the collaborating authors that Mason puts ...”

“... other bare feet besides Walcott’s belong to a corpse on a dissecting table in front of Keith Simpson, the forensic pathologist. An illegible name-tag is attached to a big toe. St Lucia may not be the Isle of Man, but legs matter here. By the time he arrived on the island in the 1550s the French privateer François Le Clerc had lost one of his in a naval ...”

“... of a Nation), Gone with the Wind and Alex Haley’s Roots – to which we can now add the O.J. Simpson trial. Rogin does not extend his historical schema beyond 1948, after which it might be argued that TV and pop music (and particularly their first synthesis, Elvis Presley) pick up and reinvent the blackface story. He does, however, introduce a new ...”

“... can easily become victims of the permanent black intifada (of which the exculpation of O.J. Simpson is as much an expression as the Los Angeles riots). That the low-skilled are being further impoverished merely means that the United States is on its way to acquiring the income-distribution characteristics of a Third World country, with a truly very rich ...”