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“... Bathurst’ he says: ‘though the rambling narration has been denounced by both Kingsley Amis and Angus Wilson, the story is as precise as a Swiss watch. Everything fits, but the reader has to wind it up.’ I doubt if the metaphor is well chosen. Such a story is more like a Post-Impressionist painting, for which we have to get our eye in and learn to ...”

“... putting the emphasis on the later, more psychologically and artistically complex stories. But as Angus Wilson (President of the Kipling Society) pointed out in his 1977 biography, this won’t really do. You can’t ignore half a career, or the political and literary traditions which shaped the whole of it. Unlike Wells, say, Kipling is not a latecomer ...”

“... tour of eminent writers, which reaches its climax in a mountain temple, where Stephen Spender and Angus Wilson look on as an enema is administered on the tatami to a haemorrhoidal Alberto Moravia. The indifference and obliviousness of these literary celebrities find their epitome in Truman Capote. ‘I have seen Japan,’ he announces in the coffee shop ...”

“... John Hanbury Angus Sparrow (1906-92) was a devotee of the poetry of A.E. Housman. He wrote a vivid introduction to Housman’s verse, whose tight control, both of metre and of homosexual passion, found obvious echoes in his own character. Sparrow was also co-author of A.E. Housman: An Annotated Hand-List, one of the few excursions into modern bibliography made by this great collector, 17th century bibliographer and connoisseur of Renaissance Latin, who counselled aspiring bibliomaniacs: (1) never lend anyone a book; (2) never sell a book; (3) never give anyone a book; (4) never read a book ...”

“... Is this really the best we can do at this moment: adopt the debunked pseudoscience of what Angus Wilson, in his excellent study of Zola, called a ‘fourth-rate cultural superstructure’? We seem to have moved from believing in a genetic basis for identity to a socially determined one. This doesn’t represent a rejection of Zola’s ...”

“... tomb of the seventh-century Bishop Eorpwald in Suffolk? They weren’t familiar with the novels of Angus Wilson. Alberto recollected that when council officials ushered around representatives of the Manhattan Loft Corporation, one day before the planning application went through for the conversion of Chatham Place into a monolith of aspiration, complete ...”

“... involved the ignis fatuus of a powerful British presence East of Suez. As late as 1965, Harold Wilson declared that Britain’s frontier was on the Himalayas. Cruel mayhem in Palestine, the debacle at Suez, inglorious doings in Cyprus and Aden, were all largely the result of this mirage. Brutality and illegality marred the superficially successful ...”

“... spontaneity their favourite moments on Top of the Pops or the first time they ate in an Angus Steak House and enjoyed a slice of Black Forest Gâteau. Of these recent decades, the 1970s is the most reviled. I once had a colleague who’d been a little girl in the 1970s, and not a particularly poor one, yet she would shudder and say: ‘Oh, it was ...”

“... the map of Central and South-East Europe along supposedly ethnic lines, based on the Woodrow Wilson principle of national self-determination. That these same treaties codified the rights of minorities was only logical, since it was the creation of these nation-states on the basis of dominant ethnic groups that had the instant fleet of establishing such ...”

“... in Forfar, and felt he’d been born to help power a ship such as this, named after his own town. Angus McInnes’s father had been a fisherman on the Isle of Harris; Angus had sailed with Forfar since early in the war, working as a lamp-trimmer. He was good pals with an assistant cook called James ...”

“... love-ballad, ‘The Honeysuckle and the Bee’. Not everyone likes this extraordinary story. Both Angus Wilson and Kingsley Amis have protested at its terse, incomprehensible oddity, and called it frankly bad. But most other admirers of Kipling, and indeed of good fiction in general, find it in its strange way consummate, haunting and powerful. But a ...”

“... about geriatrics (the only remarkable book about the elderly that immediately comes to mind is Angus Wilson’s marvellous and still not widely enough known Late Call): so one admires Ms Lamming’s decision to build her story round a half-senile widower, Arnold Lawson, who has just moved into a new district and is exciting the curiosity of the local ...”

“... in Britain. The Report on a Highway Plan for Glasgow, produced by the consultant engineers Scott Wilson Kirkpatrick for the corporation in 1965, is extraordinarily bold. The city centre – in the report, a dense, slum-ridden, sooty horror – has been evacuated and encircled by a vast motorway on stilts. At Charing Cross, apart from the Mitchell, everything ...”

“... Nattke in order to outvote the happy band of brothers; another tactic was to give a Note to John Wilson, the general secretary of Nattke, telling him to keep his men in order. That’s what union leaders are for, aren’t they? Reading Goodwin’s book, Sir Peter also discovered how often and how bitterly he had complained about his bad press: he supposes he ...”

“... that he was interned in 1940 along with Oswald Mosley. Another fascisant MP, Sir Arnold Wilson, chose expiation by enlisting in the RAF. Having somewhat surprisingly been accepted as a tail-gunner at the age of 55, he was killed when his bomber came down in France, but his memory inspired the character of Pilot Officer Sir George Corbett in the 1942 ...”