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“... than a man, subsisted on boiled eggs, cooked 50 at a time while he was boiling his glue, studied a wall on which sick persons had used to spit, imagining that he saw there fantastic cities and combats of horses. Moreover he would never suffer his fruit trees to be pruned or trained, and so on. Vasari improves the story by arguing that there was method in ...”

“... the Statue of the Unknown Norwegian). This book may be a ‘No 1 American Best-Seller’, but the Wall Street Journal was surely in error in comparing its author to James Thurber. Thurber is remembered for such apocalyptic tales as ‘The night the bed fell’ and ‘The day the dam broke’. No such distressing excitements have disturbed the peace of Lake ...”

“... No one overwrites quite like Patrick McGrath. In a crowded field, he must be British fiction’s most prodigious overwriter. He made his name writing intense, florid novels about ‘wild delusions, ungovernable passions’, ‘insanity and obsessive sexual love’ (his words). But in Port Mungo he has written a book so lush, so fruity, so gorgeous – so in love with Romance and Passion – that his own back catalogue pales into understatement ...”

“... When​ Jean-Patrick Manchette was asked about his first encounter with detective fiction, he mentioned a scene from Black Wings Has My Angel by the American writer Elliott Chaze. Originally published in 1953, this obscure lovers-on-the-run thriller was only available, until recently, in French translation.*She was sitting on the floor, naked, in a skitter of green bills … scooping up handfuls of the green money and dropping it on top of her head so that it came sliding down along the cream-coloured hair, slipping down along her shoulders and body ...”

“... The main feature of Private Eye: The First Fifty Years, at the V&A until 8 January, is a large wall plastered with the magazine’s covers. A monumental celebration, on a grand scale, of a scruffy little rag whose production values, to this day, owe much to its memorable antecedent, the British Railways lavatory roll ...”

“... counted as a casualty.’ I thought about it. ‘Do you think his name is on that black wall in Washington?’ ‘His name is on the wall.’ He took a deep breath, exhaled. ‘I checked.’ ‘The letter said nothing about the suicide?’ ‘Nothing,’ he replied. ‘We weren’t allowed to say that. I ...”

“... a dangerous business. Problems start even before you reach the first checkpoint in the perimeter wall. As we approached, a blue-uniformed Iraqi policeman, with US troops standing beside him, waved at us frantically. He was trying to warn us that if we didn’t get out of the car fifty yards in front of the checkpoint to hold up our ID cards the troops would ...”

“... was a suicide bomber. Squatting on the floor of the hospital corridor with his back against the wall while the bodyguard talked about the assassination was a depressed looking middle-aged man. His name, he said, was Jamal Gafuri. The previous day his son Khalid had been in Haifa Street, a tough Sunni neighbourhood and bastion of the resistance, where he was ...”

“... supplant exotic evils and heroism springs up in surprising places. There was never any doubt that Patrick Brontë was a man of intelligence, principles and courage: it has long been known that he insisted on sleeping in Branwell’s room during his son’s horrific last days lest, drunk and outrageous, Branwell commit some terrible act of violence. Until ...”

“... Patrick deWitt​ is the sort of writer you imagine checking his emails on an old desktop computer in the library. His five deceptively simple novels suggest pleasant, old-fashioned things. They hinge on traditional plot devices – misunderstandings, a letter delivered or undelivered, a chance meeting. There is no modern technology here ...”

“... and scared stiff of the real history that keeps leaning in through the cracks in the mausoleum wall. The images have been on the move in recent years, as this poem shows so well, but images also have real consequences in the world where Oliver seems only to see a dream. It is with an eye to consequences of this sort that tradition needs to be disentangled ...”

“... none. One building contained the entrance to a tunnel and nearby there was a faded message on the wall: ‘The martyrs of Syria are so many that they will have to build a new Syria in heaven.’ A few days after our visit, on the feast of Eid al-Adha, President Assad underlined the significance for him of Daraya’s capture by praying at the main mosque. The ...”

“... sets out to entertain with its depravity. It’s a pop chronicle of evil: the protagonist, a vile Wall Street broker named Patrick Bateman who inexplicably turns serial killer, is, it turns out, just your everyday fashion victim – Ellis’s version of the Nazi. Like the murderer nervously wiping away his ...”

“... pages are clumsily written – Connolly’s green overalls ‘stand out against the red brick wall’ where he is shot, though everyone knows he was shot sitting down – and in the end we wonder if the clumsiness is deliberate, an attempt to estrange us from the realistic mode. What else are we to make of the seven British Army bullets whistling towards ...”

“... war since 1984. The PYD denies the link, but in every PYD office there is a picture on the wall of the PKK’s leader, Abdullah Ocalan, who has been in a Turkish prison since 1999. In the year since IS was finally defeated in the siege of the Syrian Kurdish city of Kobani, Rojava has expanded territorially in every direction as its leaders repeatedly ...”