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“... untunes a synthesiser, while William Burroughs randomly folds and cuts up his prose, and Robert Rauschenberg pushes a stuffed goat through an old tyre. That all these are denatured versions of Modernist practice is something Christopher Butler recognises. But, at least at the start of the book, he has a hard time saying so. His prose sounds at one ...”

“... matter of time.Churchill is only one of the celebrities he has written to. Wilfred Pickles, Isobel Barnett, Semprini, a personality has scarcely to shove his or her nose above the horizon before Uncle Norris tries to enlist them in the no feet in the socks campaign. And his faith never falters. When he is already dying, he sends a letter promising us a share ...”

“... Tony Visconti, personal assistant Corinne Schwab, and even (or especially) his first wife, Angela Barnett. (You could write a whole piece about Angie’s polarising effect on people and the question of how much she contributed to his breakthrough in the 1970s. As someone who had to read every last page of her bafflingly awful 1993 memoir, Backstage Passes, I ...”

“... up a complex funding problem. The amount Scotland receives from the Treasury is governed by the Barnett formula, which ties it to the level of the budget for public expenditure in England, so unless Alex Salmond can work some other political magic, the funds the Scottish Executive has to devote to its various domestic priorities, including free university ...”

“... whole issue before our minds, in Peter de Bolla’s book Art Matters.2 De Bolla is looking at a Barnett Newman painting (Vir Heroicus Sublimis) in the Museum of Modern Art in New York. He has decided that the usual critical questions – what does this painting mean, what is it trying to say – are the wrong ones. He offers one or two not all that ...”

“... off. It’s a good service, a model, with none of the speakers – his two sons, Richard Eyre and Robert Bathurst – outstaying their welcome and Ben vividly recalled.Bathurst is particularly good, reading a Betjeman poem about golf, following it up with a very funny (and almost better) poem in parody by Ben himself. Since I know him chiefly from ...”