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“... psychology; I’m not sure there’s anything comparable in American literary history.† I was a young-gun devotee of Mailer, who made possible my start in writing, but I never wanted him to file adoption papers. A patriarchal nimbus settled on Bellow in his later years that remains unique, inspiring, a little weird, a bit Holy Ghost. Attending Bellow’s ...”

“... will be successful,’ he wrote in his diary on their wedding day). There he was introduced to Andrew Bonar Law, another Scots-Canadian son of the manse with a New Brunswick background, who was a rising star in the Unionist (Conservative) Party. It was the beginning of a strange, enduring relationship: Bonar Law as Aitken’s political patron and ...”

“... in the end finds Cuba to be suffering from deep ‘systemic crisis’. What was Castro like when young? His education was privileged, and followed almost exactly the same path as that of Eddy Chibas, the impassioned radio crusader and founder of the Ortodoxo Party who, until his suicide, was the greatest influence on Castro’s early political career. His ...”

“... Cantor, George Burns, George Jessel and Sophie Tucker, but the future movie mogul Harry Cohn, the young Walter Winchell and his own older brother. Signed by the Shubert Brothers in 1911, Jolson was the first product of the bastard forms of vaudeville and minstrel show to be legitimised on Broadway’s Great White Way, where he addressed his audience with an ...”

“... in the generous cycle lane provision signal a lurch in property prices: only the proscriptively young and comfortably situated have the energy to work on self-image and endorphin boosts. The dispersed community of beach drinkers fragmented and transferred a few streets inland. I witnessed one opportunist vodka thief being bounced from an Asian minimart and ...”

“... up a path to nuclear proliferation in the Middle East. Curiously, given his current stance, the young Wolfowitz was just as concerned about the emergence of a nuclear Israel as he was about Arab states with WMD. Other Vulcans have similarly tortuous career paths. The Nixon tapes reveal that an earlier Republican administration was troubled during the spring ...”

“... says Blair, and subsequently sends a charming letter of apology. The thought that this smiling young Scottish public schoolboy could be the next prime minister doesn’t cross either of our minds. On the other hand, John Birt is suitably impressed when I tell him that I actually met the great Lord Reith on the day of his extraordinary speech in the House ...”

“... from the American South-East and marched them to new lands across the Mississippi, President Andrew Jackson said: ‘Doubtless it will be painful’ for the Indians ‘to leave the graves of their fathers; but what do they more than our ancestors did, or than our children are now doing? ... Does humanity weep at these painful separations from ...”

“... The Old James, in order to feel at one with himself, had to believe, at some level, that Young James had merely slipped in technique but had really meant what the Old James meant. Horne does not pay much attention to works outside James’s own oeuvre as they might have had an influence on this undertaking, and on James’s writing: there is a ...”

“... bright, confident style, Coward irresistibly combined reserve and high camp. He became the merry-andrew of moderation, warning mothers to keep their daughters off the stage, confiding, in Present Laughter (1942), that sex was ‘vastly overrated’ and wickedly pleading: ‘don’t let’s be beastly to the Germans.’ Coward was a performer who wrote: not a ...”

“... his own magazine and sought out the Eye’s founders – Christopher Booker, Richard Ingrams and Andrew Osmond – and bought the magazine from Osmond for £1500. This was a substantial, though not an enormous investment. Within a year or so, he moved the Eye offices into the Establishment Club and then next door. At that time, the Eye consisted entirely of ...”

“... knew a thing or two about lachrymose tat, dismissed Wilson’s book as a ‘syrupy dish for young sentimentalists’. Wilson had the review suppressed and a puff inserted in its place. What is most remarkable about Wilson’s literary output is that he produced his vast and varied body of work while holding down the most prestigious humanities ...”

“... Munro’s telling of the past changes mode from something like an essay to story: The first time Andrew was ever in Edinburgh he was ten years old. With his father and some other men he climbed a slippery black street. It was raining, the city smell of smoke filled the air, and the half doors were open, showing the firelit insides of the taverns which he ...”

“... the 5000 inhabitants exposed to infection, 99.5 per cent caught the disease. John Enders and his young associate T.C. Peebles were the first to grow measles virus in the test tube in 1954, using the tissue culture techniques developed by Enders and his colleagues in the late 1940s. Much good that did him at Harvard. Even though he was awarded the Nobel Prize ...”

“... the Oppenheimers moved to San Francisco (the family name was changed about ten years later). As a young adult, Oppen came under pressure from his father to succeed in business and reacted by taking his distance. In 1928, while hitch-hiking around the country with Mary Colby, whom he married in Dallas, he bought a little sailing boat; they took it from Detroit ...”