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“... sunlight helped him to see. Once, during another picnic, Huxley was strolling along Santa Monica beach with his wife, Maria, and Thomas and Katia Mann, when Maria pointed out some long white shapes moving in a vaguely suggestive fashion. Aldous saw them as flowers, blowing in the wind. Maria realised that they were ...”

“... end of the day it could go yellowish. Sometimes a Canaletto reminds me of home. Out of town at the beach the sun heated bare sand to the point that you had to skip through it or burrow down into the cool layer below. The climate was not enervating, weather changed fast. The ingredients of the landscape which still sit firmly in my memory are, first, the ...”

“... People weren’t walking out in droves from the suburban cinema in which we saw Paul Thomas Anderson’s new film The Master because there weren’t droves there: just perhaps eight or nine people. But they did all walk out, in a slow trickle that started about halfway through the film. Staying there made us feel like loyalists in a lost cause – the future of film perhaps – but I’m not sure we were less bewildered or even less bored than those who had left ...”

“... The Whirling Eye (1920) by Thomas W. Benson and Charles S. Wolfe    A psychiatrist, visiting an insane asylum, discovers his old friend Professor Mehlman, who declares that he has been unjustly incarcerated merely because he is in love with a Venusian. Mehlman had constructed a giant telescope in the Andes to observe life on Venus ...”

“... assigned to a counterintelligence unit because he knew some German. He landed in France at Utah Beach on D-Day, survived a series of major battles, and was with his unit near Landsberg in Bavaria in April 1945 about two weeks before the war ended. The Shields-Salerno book says Salinger saw 299 days of combat but we know little about his actual experience of ...”

“... and drowsy hammocks’, and Youth (which contained Heart of Darkness), reviewed by William Beach Thomas, who had robustly little time for Conrad’s dense pessimism. Two years later, on Chekhov’s death, Francis Gribble magniloquently wavered on the fine point of the Russian’s stature: ‘he may or may not have been a man of genius.’ Too ...”

“... for-one-night-only deal, and starts – romantically, unreally, yet matter-of-factly – on the beach: ‘She had looked up at him, and he was looking at her, and it was dark, and then there was the kiss. And it was warm and sweet, with the ocean smell and the sand between her toes, and she felt better than she had all day.’ It helps, too, that Jamie is ...”

“... His other ebooks unavailable in paper include The Great Zombini (2011, with illustrations by Lou Beach), a collection of macabre dramatic monologues (‘It is not, I am afraid, the job of a schoolteacher to like children’) that display the same gift for condensed characterisation as the opening of Familiar; and Video Game Hints, Tricks and Cheats (2010), a ...”

“... death. But for now, for now there’s still Cape Canaveral (‘the Space Coast’), Disney, Miami Beach, the Keys. The constrictor-ridden Everglades, sugar and snakes. Or, indeed, G, way up north and bang inland, roughly equidistant from both coasts and the Georgia Line, unfashionable, ungarish, unfrivolous. No sherbet-coloured Deco or exercise-muscle on ...”

“... can be understood only if we take them lightly.The chief lumberer throughout the movie is Leon (Thomas Schubert), a man whose self-absorption seems like a parody of itself. Everything the film has him do ought in theory to make him unpleasant and unwatchable, but he just comes across as grumpy and helpless. He and his friend Felix (Langston Uibel) are on a ...”

“... to posters advertising seaside resorts and holiday camps. The laughing girl kneeling on the beach in the poster described in this poem has, within a couple of weeks, become ‘snaggle-toothed and boss-eyed’, with her crotch ‘fissured’. Astride a ‘tuberous cock’ and stabbed ‘right through’ the ‘moustached lips of her smile’, ‘She was ...”

“... a spoon and pouring it into a hole in the sand. According to the story, which is usually set on a beach, the saint is asking the little boy what he thinks he’s up to; to which the child replies that he’s trying to empty the sea into the hole. When the saint points out this can’t be done, the child – who reveals himself to be Jesus – ribs him, saying ...”

“... presumably to discourage Stallworthy from submitting himself further to Kipling, Housman, Dylan Thomas, Sidney Keyes and Keith Douglas. I find it strange that Tosswill sent him to Yeats and, in another letter, to Hopkins and Melville, writers to whom he was likely in any event to become addicted. No talk of much Eliot, much Empson, or much Pound, though ...”

“... both famous and infamous, and famous not for a few minutes but for ever. Three centuries later, Thomas Carlyle will write that but for you there would have been no French Revolution, no America. This is what happened not in a dream but metaphorically to Martin Luther, a hitherto obscure monk and professor of theology in an undistinguished university ...”

“... are melded with the monumental – as though one of Picasso’s neoclassical girls-on-the-beach scenes had been taken over by one of Gillray’s grossest caricatures. San Clemente stands as a link between the first and last of three frames into which Guston’s work naturally settles. The first is 1930s left-wing rhetorical social realism – Guston ...”