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“... so unyielding to Morris’s probings. In principle at least, his desire to find out what sort of man Reagan was seems entirely reasonable. Of all American Presidents, the foolish-seeming and yet abominably successful Reagan surely presents the most tempting subject for character analysis. If Morris had come back armed with any insight into what lurked ...”

“... in Seven Days’ and so on. After getting out of jail, Moat got a gun and a haircut ‘like Robert de Niro in Taxi Driver’, and he repeatedly called Sam, who had broken up with him when he was inside; she rejected him. On the night of Friday, 2 July, he was driven to Birtley, where Sam lived, by his friend Karl Ness. He tracked Sam and her boyfriend down to ...”

“... respect of professional critics, who are favoured: V.S. Naipaul, Nadine Gordimer, David Storey, Paul Scott, Iris Murdoch, for instance. Beyond that it isn’t easy to see much significance in the list – perhaps there’s a nostalgia for the old Empire (Scott, J.G. Farrell, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, plus Nadine Gordimer, Naipaul, and P.H. Newby on ...”

“... Tucked among these items is a paragraph of local news: ‘The Coroner was told that De Vere had been drinking heavily on that day. Death was due to inhalation of vomit.’ The story that Stow neatly tells is about the events leading up to that coroner’s verdict: but his way of displaying it suggests that he is attempting, as well as a skilful ...”

“... the passing of Beans, Grandpa (‘My maternal grandfather is four ways lost. He is dead. He was a man of Monmouthshire. He was a steel man. He was an industrial craftsman. You don’t get much more lost than that’); Democracy (‘Democracy is the ultimately unarguable good . . . Do you have that straight in your ...”

“... to approach more rapidly than the unified world market itself. Oryx and Crake was a brilliant tour de force, in which two dystopias and a utopia were ingeniously intertwined. What may now surprise us is that Atwood has decided to go on living in that universe, which, however, did not have a to-be-continued sign attached to it. The wonderful cliffhanger of the ...”

“... his earlier rhyming verse before issuing his Collected Poems (1928), claiming that ‘the young man interfered with his demon’ while the older man was less inhibited. Or that this edition faithfully tracks all the adjustments made by timid publishers’ readers, and the versions sent to different agents as Lawrence ...”

“... architect modelling the relationship of ‘Hans Pfitzner or Richard Strauss, or Furtwängler, or Paul Hindemith to a patron resembling Goebbels’. He suggests that Prince’s early poetic experiments were ‘influenced by the styles of political, economic and literary criticism as these were presented – or, as some would say, paraded – in the pages of ...”

“... faces, clothes and attitudes of the main players – like those dreary Art Deco canvases of Tamara de Lempicka now reproduced everywhere on postcards and Taschen calendars – have become all too familiar. Romaine Brooks’s hideous painting of Una Troubridge (with pet dachshunds) in male drag and monocle? Take it away, Madame, tout ...”

“... evidence as to his age and appearance was contradictory. More than 130 suspects are listed in Paul Begg, Martin Fido and Keith Skinner’s authoritative The Jack the Ripper A to Z (1991). Curtis claims that Ripperologists have ‘brought us no closer to the real culprit than did the exertions of Scotland Yard in 1888’, but he is unduly dismissive of ...”

“... but no crabs or waffles. Food sells: reviews of archaeology (prehistoric food), science magazines (man and his food), journals consecrated to the transdisciplinary study of sociology, anthropology and semiology (‘towards a biocultural anthropology of food’). There are the entrepreneurs of popular high food, Gault and Millau, who tell how to throw a banquet ...”

“... Camus was in charge of the paper’s literary pages, and one of the books he reviewed was Jean-Paul Sartre’s first novel, La Nausée. He immediately recognised that Sartre shared his own concern with the ‘absurdity of life’, but he was also impressed by Sartre’s suggestion that we are by nature ‘tellers of tales’, constantly transmuting our ...”

“... always rich in oil but poor in ink. But there were other cultural achievements beyond printing de-luxe editions of Cuban classics in the very young Caribbean republic. One must not forget that Cuba was the last colony in America to become independent from Spain. This happened only in 1902, and after that the small island was submitted to some sort of ...”

“... up and ‘that exotic star’ Olga Mara sweeps out, accompanied by her latest husband, the Baron de la Bonnet de la Toulon. Olga walks up the red carpet with a sternly decadent stare, her dress a simulacrum of starlight on a spider’s web. At a party after the screening, the boss of Monumental unveils the first talkie to ...”

“... Affair. In a series of interviews conducted with Didier Eribon in the late 1980s and collected in De près et de loin, he spoke of being bullied at school, and of his embattled sense of difference as a member of a national community that didn’t fully accept him. It’s tempting to imagine that this alienation was what led ...”