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“... but was a blockbuster bestseller, popping to number one on the fiction list just ahead of John le Carré’s The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. We shall never see the noble likes of such bestseller lists again. Twenty years after his debut with Dangling Man (1944), after an already notable run that included The Adventures of Augie March (his ...”

“... herself; the trouble was that Peters did too.In the autumn of 1973, Joan Didion and her husband, John Gregory Dunne, had approached Warner Bros offering to write a new version of A Star Is Born. The original film from 1937 and its 1954 remake with Judy Garland had been set in Hollywood, but Didion and Dunne wanted to explore the music industry. Several ...”

“... New Wave. The line-up included a geeky white dude in joke-shop doctor’s scrubs, a muscly black guy with a dyed mohican, and two unlikely-looking white women (lesbians to boot, it turned out). Prince was having big fun with the play of appearances, abandoning strict reverence to any supposedly ‘authentic’ truth of what it is to be black, or male, or ...”

“... store. On midsummer’s night in 1955 a tall, broad-shouldered farmer 17 years her senior, John Warren, took her to the stock car racing, and a year later, when Wendy was 21, they got married. John Warren rented 175 acres from the local squire in Dunton Bassett, a village in the south-west of the county. He’d been ...”

“... McLaren would have picked up the Situationist sensibility not by reading – the main texts, Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle for one, weren’t available in English translation until the 1970s – but by fraternising with King Mob and seeing photographs of the thought-bomb graffiti that proliferated in Paris in May 1968. Some of these utopian ...”

“... Letters, his work was still overseen by the family. ‘I remember removing a letter dealing with Guy Domville from the Selected Letters,’ Edel wrote, ‘because Billy James’ – another nephew – ‘found it too sad.’ Between 1974 and 1984 Edel published a four-volume edition that included 1100 letters, noting that ‘the large James archives in many ...”

“... and that so rudely that he solos immediately, sputtering and complaining loudly like an ordinary guy but through a plunger-mute: why don’t somebody give a poor ol’ trombonist a hand or seat? In ‘John Hardy’s Wife’, the characteristically smooth ensemble performance is suddenly interrupted by the ...”

“... his trial for murder, became a particular rallying point. In 1974, Hutchings shot and killed John Pat Cunningham, a 27-year-old man with severe learning difficulties, as he ran away from an army patrol. Johnny Mercer, the veterans’ affairs minister who led the campaign to protect former soldiers, described the passage of the Troubles Legacy Act last ...”

“... in his own day could be accounted Powell’s leading champion. In a front-page spread in the TLS, John Bayley hailed him under the banner of ‘A Family and Its Fictions’. There was a conflict in Powell, he explained, between the Gothic and Gallic sides of his imagination, which lent much of the richness to his work – provided the former, with its better ...”

“... was indicted for ‘unlawfully receiving the naked private parts of a person in his mouth’; John Day for ‘permitting a person to handle [his] private parts naked’. In 1835 John Smith and James Pratt were spied through a keyhole having sex in a room in a lodging house on Blackfriars Road. ‘The detection of these ...”

“... past, an encyclopedia of forgotten modalities for any postal occasion. ‘When I joined,’ said John Colbert, now the CWU’s communications and campaigns manager, ‘you were in a classroom for two months, learning all the different acronyms. There was a postal instruction for everything. What every label meant. At the end of it you had a sorting test. If ...”

“... states such as Ukraine have no choice but to submit to the nearest great power, has run its course.John Mearsheimer’s argument of recent weeks that what we are seeing played out is ‘not imperialism [but] great-power politics’ will strike many as a distinction without a difference. Imperial history has far more to teach us than our decaying Atlantic ...”

“... managed this, had succeeded in identifying himself as both an intellectual star and an ordinary guy, without needing to compromise himself in either role. Long before he made it at Columbia or at Cambridge, longer still before he began to rise to a position of prominence among the New York literary intellectuals, Podhoretz had thus proved to his own lasting ...”

“... making a patronising show of it, and stayed to tell a good story about Christopher Hill and John Sparrow, and of how he’d been the unwitting agent of a quarrel between them, while ignoring an ambitious and possessive American professor who kept yelling ‘Eye-zay-ah! Eye-zay-ah!’ from across the room. (‘Yes,’ he murmured at the conclusion of the ...”