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“... an hour along Highway 91 through the Nevada desert. Shortly after five o’clock, the writer Mason Williams rolled down the passenger window, and threw out a Royal Model X typewriter. Patrick Blackwell photographed the results. Although Wershler-Henry devotes twenty pages or so to ‘the typewriter girl’ and ‘Remington priestesses’, and notes that ...”

“... to the world at the Annual Party Conference. From now on there is less excuse for ignorance. Paul Whiteley, Patrick Seyd and Jeremy Richardson have conducted the first national survey of Conservative Party members, based on a sample of 34 constituency associations in various regions, including Scotland. Since the survey is based on a standardised ...”

“... lost touch with them, she moved away from the other members of the Shelley circle, Mary, Jane Williams, whose husband had drowned with Shelley, Jefferson Hogg, Trelawney, Hunt. Her work as governess and teacher took her to Tsarist Russia into the employ of a nobleman who would rather have perished than know he had taken into his home a companion of that ...”

“... This biography opens with a vivid chapter on Raymond Williams’s funeral. Entitled ‘Prologue, in Memoriam’, it transports the reader to Clodock Church, ‘a plain little building’ in the foothills of the Black Mountains. It is a comfortless day, Fred Inglis tells us. ‘The light fell crooked and the road fell wrong ...”

“... is sung as the cast processes out of the church); a homespun cacophony.Two biographies, by Paul Kildea and Neil Powell, intelligently appraise this official and unofficial Britten, and are rich with contradiction. Britten was quietly radical and quietly conservative. He was a joiner and a separatist: he lived most of his life in Suffolk, well away from ...”

“... to malicious attempts to incriminate their author (who gleefully collected them all). As Abigail Williams points out in her fine history of readerly misprision, Pope’s Rape of the Lock (1714) is one of the few 18th-century satires still deemed accessible enough for classroom anthologies and survey courses. But the poem also endlessly frustrates readers ...”

“... managed to suppress it (‘the veriest twaddle’). This snapshot – one of many in Charles Williams’s biography – reveals two factors in Beaverbrook’s success. The first is that posh English society was no match for him. He was ‘vulgar’, but there was a charm in his self-promotion which made languid ladies and gentlemen want to be on his side ...”

“... their surviving son and their servants, the household included their new friends Edward and Jane Williams, their children and servants, and Mary’s half-sister, Claire Clairmont.Clairmont’s five-year-old daughter with Byron, Allegra, had died of typhus (or possibly malaria) only a few days earlier, in the convent near Ravenna where her father had more or ...”

“... Her father, born to a prosperous Jewish family in Belarus as Feivel Levertoff, renamed himself Paul and was ordained in the Church of England. Levertov was taught at home by her mother and then went to ballet school. ‘Hitler is not going to make me give up my career,’ she told her parents – but still, she gave up dancing in 1940, the same year she ...”

“... brilliance’, her ‘rare and special talent’. On the dust-jacket, Tennessee Williams described Two Serious Ladies as ‘my favourite book’.When her friend had finished reading, Bowles spoke bluntly: ‘I know you mean this kindly, darling, but you couldn’t have done anything more cruel … You see, it all makes me realise what I was ...”

“... naysayers like Ronald Reagan with his Hollywood pieties, and the ‘twinkling demagogue’ John Paul II, who toured America while Raban was on the river. Raban does encounter one local hero worth following, and in Memphis, Tennessee, he abandons his river journey for a few weeks to serve as a squire in a different sort of quest. Judge Otis Higgs is ...”

“... alien and a programme revealing the secrets of alchemy, both shunted from Scottish screens by ‘a Paul Coia quiz show about hills’ and a ‘cartoon series about Gaelic accidents’. There has been no better expression of the deeply Scottish suspicion that the English might be having more fun than we are. ‘Stop the world, Scotland wants to get on,’ the ...”

“... Jungle Band’s most extraordinary sounds were produced by the trumpeters Bubber Miley and Cootie Williams (who took Miley’s place in 1929) and the trombonist Joe Nanton, whose nickname ‘Tricky Sam’ projected the essence of ‘jungle’ techniques. Following the example of King Oliver, they developed a wider variety of often speech-like growling and ...”

“... and mysteriously resigned as Premier. The list, written down by Wilson’s éminence grise, Marcia Williams, on her lavender-coloured writing paper, consisted almost entirely of rich right-wing businessmen who supported the Tory Party. It included the Lord High Buccaneer from Milnsbridge, James Hanson. When Thatcher was returned as Prime Minister in ...”

“... The pure products​ of America go crazy, William Carlos Williams wrote, but he was only half right: America’s crazy, and so sometimes its pure products go sane. Consider the eponymous narrator of Paul Beatty’s novel The Sellout. When we first meet him, in the Supreme Court’s ‘cavernous chambers’, the sellout’s hands are cuffed behind his back ...”