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“... and dressed himself up as the respectable chairman. In Bill Gates, Small Brother, the average ugly guy coincides with and contains the figure of evil genius who aims for total control of our lives. In early James Bond movies, the evil genius was an eccentric figure, dressed extravagantly, or alternatively, in the grey uniform of the Maoist commissar. In the ...”

“... was guaranteed to increase its underground following. It was Ginsberg’s old Columbia colleagues, John Hollander, Norman Podhoretz and Louis Simpson, all cutting their teeth in the New York literary scene under the approving auspices of Lionel and Diana Trilling, who led the charge against the Beats. ‘It is only fair to Allen Ginsberg to remark on the utter ...”

“... As Songs of the Doomed so spectacularly illustrates, Doc’s the first American writer since John Dos Passos to tap the eroding and elemental fury within the American Dream and make the compost picture of American society in the last quarter of the 20th century work so elegantly on paper. I discovered two curious things about Doc’s writing when I was ...”

“... fashion, film, graphics and display have begun to dissolve. The ‘society of the spectacle’, as Guy Debord dubbed it in the Sixties, has engulfed every facet of visual communication. At the same time, the speed and scope of communication have intensified so that images of every type are disseminated much more rapidly, both within what remain of specific ...”

“... special needs. (His new friends thought he was the school handyman, which fitted with his tough-guy persona, but in reality he volunteered at the school in exchange for free ‘dyslexia lessons’, though he wasn’t dyslexic.) He spent the rest of his time gathering intelligence on anti-racist groups. Spying on campaigners across Europe, he became so good ...”

“... its merchants, their wives, its virgins and, naturally, its mayor: He ys exempler, loodster and Guy [guide] Pryncypall patron, & Rose orygynall Above all mayrys, as mastyr most worthy – London thow art the flowyr of Cytees all. Dunbar has periodically been fingered as the Scottish priest. Not without reason – the poem has a rhyme scheme that he ...”

“... one does: ‘When I was in graduate school I was startled to find this story’s source in The John Collier Reader, – or so I have always believed until this afternoon, when I first riffled, then paged carefully, front to back, back to front, through the local copy (Knopf, 1972) and discovered no trace of such a story anywhere in the book.’ But over ...”

“... you can see your way clear to letting this go, to letting Flynn go,’ Trump said. ‘He is a good guy. I hope you can let this go.’ An odd, almost extracurricular point that draws attention only when you think about it, was Trump’s telling Comey that he didn’t mind if some of his satellites were casualties in the Russia investigation. Trump, in ...”

“... talking about,’ and hung up, Calley was stricken. ‘He knew … he was going to be the fall guy for the murders at My Lai,’ Hersh writes. Hersh’s first dispatch on My Lai focused on the army’s charge that Calley had killed 109 civilians. Life and Look magazines turned the piece down; Robert Silvers of the New York Review of Books offered to ...”

“... even by Bosch’s standards, and dramatised by little dots and stitches applied to the belt, cap, guy rope and trailing flounces – what do they do? What are they meant to suggest? Maybe that the costume is threadbare. Maybe that it’s flimsy and transparent. Jesters are beggars, after all. Burghers are not amused by them. Somehow the nature of the grey ...”

“... the cinematography or the design.It was the beginning of the off-network TV tsunami that John Landgraf, the head of FX, calls peak TV. By 2022, he estimates that there were 559 scripted original shows on American television. HBO followed The Sopranos with Curb Your Enthusiasm, Six Feet Under, The Wire, Deadwood, Entourage, True Blood, Boardwalk ...”

“... the private sector sets aside for corporate sheen, although it does have a museum dedicated to John Charnley, who, almost half a century ago, pioneered the popular benchmark of the NHS’s success or failure, the hip replacement operation. They still do hips at Wrightington, and knees, and elbows, and shoulders. They deal with joint problems that are too ...”

“... he would have been disappointed. There was some half-hearted praise from Movement types, but when John Carey, for example, needed an honourable popular writer to batter the highbrows with in The Intellectuals and the Masses (1992), he turned to Arnold Bennett. Morgan’s biography had a memorable centrepiece: a description of the senile Maugham crapping on ...”

“... pastoral balm akin to the American Scene Regionalist paintings of Thomas Hart Benton and John Steuart Curry. ‘You hear those banjoes ringin’, darkies singin’’ Armstrong continues, the lyrics almost washed away by his majestic trumpet solo. The song looks worse, literally, in a 1935 movie short by trumpeter Red Nichols and His Five ...”

“... Brian Wilson over those of Norman Whitfield, and the social significance and songwriting talent of John Lennon rather than James Brown – persists. Clearly, too, most rock writing foregrounds lyrics, whereas most dance music works through texture, beats and effects. Back in 1976, punk set itself against disco wholeheartedly. Alan Jones and Jussi Kantonen ...”