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“... no doubt with an eye on Orwell’s centenary, which falls this year), he has written a short book entirely devoted to telling us, as the title of the US edition has it, ‘Why Orwell Matters’. One therefore turns with interest to see how Hitchens, an acknowledged master of the literary bazooka attack, will acquit himself in the trickier arts of ...”

“... in Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting are ‘failures in a country ay failures’, Jerry Brown falls short in the heartland of success: ‘failed husband and failed parent, failed father, general no fucking hoper’. The novel takes place on the eve of his departure, as Jerry ventures from his motel room to down a few beers and reflect on the life he is leaving ...”

“... with Scott Fitzgerald), a ‘somewhat rackety woman’, and a character at the Oxford of Philip Larkin’s novel Jill is said to be ‘an aggressively rackety minor-public-school undergraduate’. ‘Rackety types have a link with people of the intellect,’ Powell writes in his notebook, and his novels are full of quite unintellectual types, usually ...”

“... to the fleshpots to indulge in those hectic intimacies hostilities notoriously encourage. In the short view, this kind of war might at some point have landed him up with the MO. In the long view, it would almost certainly have landed him with the OM. It was not to be. True love had walked in on Auden six months earlier. Henceforth it was to be personal ...”

“... and patrons, to be granted an unposed snapshot of the child behind the man, Mandelson’s short-trousered induction into political life. Boy Peter on a Hovis bicycle! That was the madeleine moment in an interminable chronicle of not-saying, arcane rituals of grazing and trouser-changing unmatched since Roberto Rossellini made The Taking by Power by ...”

“... the Times. Others left it alone. It is easy to feel sympathy for those literary editors who at short notice found themselves in this predicament, but their fears of becoming the dupes of a sinister literary plot now seem exaggerated. Philip Toynbee, for example, who declared that he had never really been taken in for a ...”

“... publish his poems, but broke down again and failed to get a degree. Student friends, who included Philip Hobsbaum and Ted Hughes, registered that Redgrove was impressively unusual. Hobsbaum thought he bore ‘a resemblance to Frankenstein’s monster, only better dressed’. Harry Guest recalls him carrying ‘a swordstick with him’ – like a Mr Hyde ...”

“... those put forward in James’s letters. In his remaining 16 years, Sturgis wrote nothing except a short story, ‘The China Pot’, about a minor writer so crushed by the criticisms of a great writer that he kills himself, the great writer pretending not to understand why. Belchamber is an odd book disguised as a more conventional one. Sturgis could certainly ...”

“... destruction. ‘Oh, Adolf! Adolf! You will be out of luck!’When the article was republished as a short book, it included Thompson’s suggestion, barely veiled, that Hitler was probably gay. When she returned to Berlin in 1934, she knew better than to expect a warm welcome from the new chancellor. But no American reporter had been expelled from the Reich ...”

“... This unanimity should therefore be worth looking into, especially in the case of work like Philip Larkin’s, always more reserved and elusive than it seems. I want to consider his writing in juxtaposition with that of Kingsley Amis, close friend of the poet’s for over forty years; and to begin with Amis’s recent Booker Prize-winning novel. The ...”

“... and we can’t wait to get to know you.’And take you for every penny we can.7 July. Run into Philip and Kersti French in M&S with Philip bent tight over his trolley and using it as a walker. I ask him how he is. ‘Dreadful’. ‘Anything specific?’ ‘Knees. Legs. Lungs. Kidneys … Shall I go on?’ The recital so ...”

“... historians should consult his remarks on X, Catacomb, and the New English Weekly edited by Philip Mairet, a man of integrity and enthusiasm whom Sisson affectionately evokes: ‘his eyes would light up as visibly as the bulbs on a pin-table, as the ideas rattled round.’ The bohemian world of poets, painters and little magazines, the ‘natural ...”

“... to a domestic deathbed. This vision of dying brings to mind Motion’s moving elegy for Philip Larkin, in his previous collection Natural Causes (1987), which evokes Larkin facing death, not at home, but in a ‘nursing home’, and records his remark on the uselessness of poetic rehearsals of one’s end: The trouble is, I’ve written scenes like ...”

“... Girls, which featured an interview with a 21-year-old woman who had had 789 lovers. ‘Prince Philip, Mary Whitehouse, Lord Hailsham and Brigid Brophy were all quoted on what they thought about the subject.’ The only sex-related subject not permitted in the paper was homosexuality. Murdoch was against it: ‘Do you really think the readers are ...”

“... are not written by literary men, or at least not by writers who are writing as writers. Thus Sir Philip Sidney, in the book’s opening letter, addresses himself with a terseness never found in his poetry or prose to Mr Molyneux, his father’s secretary, whom he accuses of showing to others the letters he has written to his father. In brief, pungent, most ...”