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“... tiny artworks made from split lengths of human hair, collected by the artist Susan Hiller, to Richard Wentworth’s snapshots of traffic cones or abandoned gloves or old boots. Some of the objects are related in theme: to go with the Arctic tusk and its story of loss, there’s also a king penguin Shackleton brought back from the other pole, now stiff as ...”

“... true celebrity ‘delivers’. He or she keeps weaving and moving in an effort not to disappoint. Richard Nixon was such a one. Every time a new segment of Watergate tape was released, revealing his Jew-baiting or thuggery or corruption, he would publish a new book on grand strategy or at least fly to Beijing. What a trouper! Such a pro! Say what you like ...”

“... Richard Ford’s narrator, Frank Bascombe, quit serious writing to become a sports-writer. This was the making of Ford. It wasn’t until he became Bascombe, the sportswriter, that Ford turned himself into a major novelist. At odd moments in The Sportswriter, Frank looks back on his abandoned literary career. He had published a ‘promising’ collection of stories, Blue Autumn, and had then started on a novel which he never finished ...”

“... In 1950 a venerable, once highly successful, long-ailing magazine quietly expired. Richard Usborne, the assistant editor in its dying days, later recalled an aficionado’s touching reaction. ‘When the Strand finally folded in 1950, my old sixth-form master wrote to me regretfully: “I loved the dear old Strand ...”

“... reminding people of an earlier claim, made by Jeremy Paxman, that Charles regularly instructs his cook to boil seven eggs each morning in the hope of getting a soft one. But then quickly quotes a former private secretary who says this can’t be true, because Charles hates waste. This is Mayer’s method, a method you might recognise, that of the ‘good ...”

“... than an insight into Lean’s career, and in fact he made a television film about Captain Cook in this period as well as preparing for a finally scuttled remake of Mutiny on the Bounty; but there is no doubt that he felt he had got something wrong and that he didn’t like being wrong. It is also true that he had earlier managed to keep going in spite ...”

“... few pages before being overwhelmed by its complex cast of late Victorian characters, who – like Richard Jebb – have long since ceased to be household names, if indeed they ever were; and by what now comes across as its cloyingly sentimental perspective on the sun and strawberries of late Victorian privilege, unmitigated (as Raven observed) by much ...”

“... subject. A volume did appear in 1988 – English Extremists, written with Deyan Sudjic and Peter Cook, celebrating the postmodern architects Campbell Zogolovitch Wilson Gough – but since then his medium has been television. Meades has never been a fully paid-up architectural correspondent; he argues in Museum without Walls that taking up such a job helped ...”

“... is perhaps the last of his judgments on himself. This is said to be an autobiographical novel, and Richard Lourie, in his introduction, calls it ‘the culmination of everything he has so far written’, but it strikes me more as an elegy, a jazz elegy in five movements, of which three are very much more important than the others. Like Ratushinskaya, Sinyavsky ...”

“... is Kay? I am going to tell you. Eat your broccoli.) Kay is a successful woman, a beauty, a cook, a campaigner for justice and a columnist of national acclaim, right? She is erotically equipped with long legs, big breasts, and a Roman nose with flared nostrils, endowments calculated to set men thinking impure thoughts. She herself is contemptuous of ...”

“... a musicologist of considerable importance, as well as a knowledgeable gardener and a resourceful cook. Since she also seems to have been a good and sensitive friend it is fair to conclude that she was altogether a rare and admirable person. Many pages of the diaries now published are about her love for Valentine Ackland, the woman with whom she lived for ...”

“... are supposed to be court ladies, they sound as though they actually knew what it was like to cook and run a house. According to Miss Heinemann this sets them off sharply from principal characters in Shakespeare, mere consumers of feasts and fine wines whose tables are spread and cleared by servants, and whose food imagery reflects their distance from ...”

“... and complex treatise full of ambiguity and complex allusion, a sort of political bible with Sir Richard Scott in the role of the Yahweh/ Saviour and Robin Cook and Ian Lang fighting it out to play St Paul. In fact, the occasional double negative aside (these alone have been enough to drive our illiterate media into ...”

“... vengefulness, the compulsive penis envy, and the desire to be whipped, of Captain Ahab. Only Richard Henry Dana in Two Years Before the Mast and, in The Oregon Trail, Francis Parkman, whose homosexual proclivities deserve more attention here, come forward as relatively standard cases of the urge to ‘be a man’. Leave it to the genteel types ...”

“... can be put down to Post-Modern faddishness, though vampires have a more venerable pedigree, as Richard Davenport-Hines notes in his agreeable romp through Gothic art from Salvator Rosa to Damien Hirst. Bram Stoker’s Dracula, now translated into over forty languages, has exerted an enduring fascination since its publication in 1897, with Dracula himself ...”