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“... corner of the mouth or held in the hand in such a way that the smoke would turn his fingers oak-brown, the felt hat, dark shirt and light tie, which gave him a gangsterish appearance, though more Guys and Dolls Runyonesque than High Sierra Bogartian. I knew, too, that he was queer (the term ‘gay’ wasn’t used then), though I can’t recall just how ...”

“... the marginal social acceptability of Mrs Tiggy-Winkle, whose hand, ‘holding the teacup, was very brown, and very, very wrinkly with the soap-suds; and all through her gown and her cap there were hairpins sticking wrong end out; so that Lucie didn’t like to sit too near her.’ Both these essays show off Davenport’s range and gusto, his feats of ...”

“... Black male artist works very hard to get his due,’ Gladys Knight said. ‘If Bobby Brown had across the board play and could compete in the same [pop] categories George Michael competes in, that would be a whole other thing.’Michael was the biggest selling musician in the world in 1988. He was 25 and seemed ready to outdo Michael ...”

“... was added to the bad ‘news’. Women become clocks, always ticking away, like the crocodile in Peter Pan who had swallowed the alarm clock. Women must marry and have children immediately, skipping the attractions of further education or interesting careers. There were no men and yet it was every young woman’s painful duty to try to find and hang onto a ...”

“... windfall tax on profits imposed in 1981 by Mrs Thatcher’s chancellor Geoffrey Howe. (Blair or Brown would never dream of doing anything like that to the City.) But the abolition of exchange controls in 1979 and the increasingly international flow of capital, combined with the abolition of restrictions on trading practices which culminated in the ‘Big ...”

“... Empson’s summer absence at the School of Letters in Bloomington, Indiana. The student producer, Peter Cheeseman (now Director of the New Victoria Theatre, North Staffordshire), together with the stage manager Alan Curtis, bulked up Empson’s spare and insufficiently dramatic verse with ‘alchemical mumbo-jumbo’; the composer Gilbert Kennedy ensured the ...”

“... his life to maim//Himself somehow for the job,’ he wrote in a posthumous address to the painter Peter Lanyon. Apart from a brief and incongruous spell as an advertising copywriter and the occasional stint on fishing boats, he refused to succumb to the distraction of a day job; he didn’t write reviews or journalism; and as his books of verse were very far ...”

“... nine-to-five wage-slave grind found its most vivid street-level expression in avid consumerism. As Peter Gay put it, paraphrasing Walter Gropius: ‘The cure for the ills of modernity is more, and the right kind, of modernity.’ This could be Mod speaking. Gay’s reflection is from his 1968 book Weimar Culture, and its subtitle is also applicable here: The ...”

“... the International Monetary Fund, estimates the US subsidy at $83 billion a year. Senators Sherrod Brown (Democrat, Ohio) and David Vitter (Republican, Louisiana) have asked Congress’s investigative arm, the Government Accountability Office, to come up with a more authoritative figure. No one to my knowledge has done the equivalent calculation for the ...”

“... also what is billed in the programme as a ‘Special Guest’. This turns out to be Gordon Brown, who makes a decent speech too and one which, as R. says, must be impromptu as he repeats himself. Flattered to be gathered up by Neil and taken in past the explanatory displays (‘You don’t want all this foreplay, do you?’) to the figures ...”

“... ticket booth – a fat and somewhat sinister personage with homemade tattoos, pockmarks and huge brown bloodshot eyes – has instructed us to pay her.It is with some relief that I spot my mother still under the tree. Alone in her wheelchair she looks vulnerable and dignified. It’s starting to hit me that she really can’t walk any more. That her vision ...”

“... stretched out naked on her bed upstairs during a bibulous evening with the Styrons, Nichols, Peter Matthiessen and the rest, Mahoney comments – with the bizarre know-nothingism of the amnesiac – that her ‘nipples were the size of Oreos’. This culminating image of the post-prandial, brown-nippled Hellman ...”

“... Institute of the Market with backing from the neo-liberal Institute of Economic Affairs in London; Peter Aven, who had worked for some time in Vienna; Boris Feodorov, who had recently taken up a job with the London-based European Bank for Reconstruction and Development. Many of these men knew each other well: Kagalovsky, an inveterate networker, arranged ...”

“... becomes a series of rescue missions, staged opportunities for heroism worthy of Hollywood: mobs of brown-skinned extras look up to see helicopters – we are saved! The Americans have arrived! Such are the dreams that hover unarticulated in our political unconscious, allowing our leaders to redefine war as humanitarian intervention. The triumph of fantasy ...”

“... and studied it in Busman’s Honeymoon, the last Wimsey novel, in which the now married Lord Peter solves a murder in rural Hertfordshire. On the night of the execution he is tormented by doubt and stays up all night, and Harriet wonders whether he will ever come to her for comfort? For if he does not, their love is doomed … (Christie once called ...”