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“... On certain days, Didion is quite a nice accompaniment to one’s nervous system. When she was young and working for Vogue, she took a correspondence course in ‘shopping-centre theory’. She was a good student and a dab hand at parking ratios. It was part of her dream life. (‘My interest in shopping centres was in no way casual.’) There was a ...”

“... animal-like in the sheer strikingness of his animation. ‘He has still the air and manner of a young man,’ the journalist William Archer wrote, ‘for illness has neither tamed his mind nor aged his body. It has left its mark, however, in the pallor of his long oval face, with its wide-set eyes, straight nose, and thin-lipped, sensitive mouth, scarcely ...”

“... Journalistic ethos was overstrained in Cooke’s case, for her infant addict didn’t exist. The young journalist got caught, the paper was humiliated, but the only element in the tale that was brand new was the level of mea culpa that seemed to invigorate all the participants. In recent times, this level of regret has become somewhat operatic, and this ...”

“... way: blank, rheumy-eyed, sick as the day was long. An unmerry child with St Vitus’ Dance, the young Warhol lay twitching in his bed under a blanket of fan magazines, the source of all his imaginary friendships – with Errol Flynn and Louella Parsons, Hedda Hopper and Gary Cooper – and the only thing he craved in those Pittsburgh days was the chance to ...”

“... as MI5 and MI6 had to be kept so secret; MI5 remained officially secret for 80 years. Christopher Andrew has another explanation, however. It was just a ‘taboo’, he writes (quoting the historian Michael Howard), like ‘intra-marital sex’. Everyone knew it went on, and was ‘quite content that it should, but to speak, write or ask questions about ...”

“... the fields beyond Blantyre continue to be parched. ‘We’ve got used to drought,’ said Kwa, a young linguist who wants to write novels. ‘This year is no different: we have less water than the crops need.’ As we drove over the sticky tarmac roads leading out of the city, it was hard to think of this country as having once been the domain of Hastings ...”

“... to one of Perlin’s respondents, many Westminster interns have ‘horses and Aston Martins’. A young lawyer on the Ninth Circuit Court (based in San Francisco) assured Perlin that the interns were all driving ‘Lexuses, Mercedes’ and other ‘all-leather, fully-loaded cars’. Internships have always been upper-class rites of passage. But this economic ...”

“... beauty causing turmoil and consternation. Socrates astonished even himself: he was used to finding young men attractive, but Charmides was something else. Even the youngest boys in the room turned to stare, gazing at him ‘as if he were a statue’. By now, perhaps, too many page-three captions in the Sun and too many lectures from Andrea Dworkin have taken ...”

“... in 1936 – a bad period not only in England but throughout Europe – he left a widow and the young George in somewhat reduced circumstances. The change of name from Behar to Blake was understandable enough. However, there were further complications which did not help the boy, then rising twelve: one of the Behar sisters had married a banker, Henri ...”

“... the Routemaster, a pocket-sized production as sleek as the vehicle it elegises.* The name of its young author, Travis Elborough, pictured in 1970s spectacles and scarf on the back flap, trails hints of encryption: ‘Alight, O Bus Rover’ perhaps, or ‘Rival Hogs Route B’. To enthuse about buses is to run the gauntlet of nerdishness, to court it ...”

“... and Dennis Waterman in their Minder roles are now thought suitable characters to help encourage young people to stay off drugs in a series of commercials sponsored by the DHSS. The thought of dear old Arthur ending up inside for some of his misdeeds would be almost unthinkable, had it not been for Ronnie Barker and his alter ego Norman Stanley ...”

“... he looks at Ford is the elegiac element in his westerns, the way his static camera summons what Andrew Sarris has called ‘his feelings of loss and displacement already fantasised through the genre’. The Old West is a vista of mourning, yet the films are about the funny and mysterious and sometimes savage ways that people survive there and go on to make ...”

“... In 1982, at the age of 30, Andrew Motion, together with Blake Morrison, claimed attention in the Introduction to the Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry for the idea that ‘British poetry is once again undergoing a transition’: the new poets, many of them ‘Martians’, showed ‘a preference for metaphor and poetic bizarrerie to metonymy and plain speech’, and ‘a renewed interest in narrative ...”

“... The London Review sent out prose, and poems, from that building every fortnight, and one day a young man came to the door with a bomb strapped to his back. Standing in the square the other day, trying to ignore the statue of Mahatma Gandhi – it’s not hard to ignore, both because of its ugliness and the minatory nature of his peaceableness – I reached ...”

“... if you don’t really want it, but Spender protested too much. In 1994 he wrote a letter to the young Alan Hollinghurst after receiving a copy of his second novel, The Folding Star. The letter shows a man in a state of confusion or unhappiness about the choices he has made. Dear Mr Hollinghurst Thank you very much for asking your publisher to send me ...”