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“... Palance by Alan Ladd in Shane is exquisite, but Shane as a whole is a phoney. (But its director, George Stevens, did direct a musical that’s a serious candidate for greatness: Swing Time.) And the problem of evaluating the makers is vastly complicated, as it is with the Elizabethan and Jacobean plays, by the fact that the creation is usually collaborative ...”

“... and bills of sale, Marks and his team of researchers unearthed some unexpected gems. The diary of George Hunter White, a dead Federal Bureau of Narcotics agent, was particularly startling. White had worked as Gottlieb’s fixer in the underworlds of New York and San Francisco, conducting drug experiments on unknowing subjects in brothels or at parties he held ...”

“... cad. To combine the two into one character was a good move – presumably the work of Jay Presson Allen, the writer credited for Marnie. Evan Hunter, who wrote The Birds and worked on Marnie before Allen, argued with Hitchcock over a scene in which the sexually inhibited Marnie is raped by her husband during their honeymoon ...”

“... more than 300 Rubáiyáts – was put together by the polymorphous Orientalist Edward Heron-Allen, who was an expert in cheirosophy (palm-reading), the leading light in the field of fidicinology (the study of instruments played with a bow), and wrote the definitive work on barnacles. Heron-Allen struggled to identify ...”

“... of Bulgaria and Dalmatia? Legends of a great flood permeated many traditions. In 1876, George Smith published his translations of the cuneiform writing preserved on baked-clay tablets from Mesopotamia – which recorded what we now call the Epic of Gilgamesh. These fragments from the great library of Nineveh spoke, in a language known as ...”

“... confined to Shakespeare: among those the countess patronised were James Thomson, John Gay and George Frideric Handel (of whom she painted a portrait), all of them occasional guests at the Ashley-Cooper family seat, St Giles House, at Wimborne St Giles in Dorset.My interest was much piqued by the fact that I knew the Wimborne St Giles estate, or at least ...”

“... in his introduction, is that no modern English writer can ‘hold a candle’ to Dickens or George Eliot. Born in 1960, Taylor has now written two books on post-war English fiction – the first was A Vain Conceit (1989) – expounding the Victorian values that he first acquired (as he now tells us) when reading Dombey and Son in his father’s ...”

“... or hate poems because they are – every single one of them – failures? The poet and critic Allen Grossman tells a story (there are many versions of the story) that goes like this: you’re moved to write a poem because of some transcendent impulse to get beyond the human, the historical, the finite. But as soon as you move from that impulse to the ...”

“... the mysteries of the everyday. When Jennings assembled a collection of M-O ‘day reports’ on George VI’s coronation, published under the title May the Twelfth, he was sure it marked the beginning of an entirely new form of literature. He thought of the methods of Mass-Observation less as sociology than as a kind of poetry, one which, in Roland ...”

“... best and most enduring. Fulcrum also published two important early collections by Robert Duncan, Allen Ginsberg’s Ankor Wat and, most significantly, two volumes by Lorine Niedecker, North Central and My Life by Water, and George Oppen’s Collected Poetry. Of British poets, apart from Bunting, Montgomery published four ...”

“... was one of the reasons why they had failed. But, thanks to the willingness of the publisher, George Smith, to lose £70,000 on an outlay of £100,000, the DNB, ‘in accord with the self-reliant temperament of the British race’, was ‘the outcome of private enterprise and the handiwork of private citizens’. Thus conceived and completed, embodying ...”

“... assassinations and mass killings. Yet it still gives me an eerie feeling to read about people like George Orwell, Stephen Spender and Raymond Aron, to say nothing of less admirable characters of the Melvin Lasky stripe, taking part in surreptitiously subsidised anti-Communist ventures – magazines, symphony orchestras, art exhibitions – or in the setting up ...”

“... encourage Soviet officials to defect and to use exiles in ‘politico-psychological operations’. George Kennan, the State Department official whose famous ‘long telegram’ of February 1946 kick-started the Cold War, liked the idea and moved Wisner to the CIA’s new Office of Policy Co-ordination to oversee a ‘guerrilla warfare corps’. One of the ...”

“... recur in Barker’s fiction), a pacifist now imprisoned for an improbable plot to poison Lloyd George with curare. Her cell is under unremitting surveillance, and the spyhole in the door is surrounded by an elaborately painted eye. Increasingly convinced that she has been clumsily framed by the Intelligence Unit that employs him, Prior’s loyalties are ...”

“... as the Earl of Chesterfield said, ‘he was taken by many at a distance for a gilt garland.’ George Brummell, an equally famous beau of a later day, would have thought that irredeemably vulgar. Yet Bath, a city in the ascendant, needed someone like Nash. When the 18th century came in it was half spa, half pleasure resort. The haut ton found Tunbridge ...”