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“... to swap genitals with Marcela, an art critic. It sounds like a less po-faced version of the Chapman brothers’ work – figures with penises for noses and that sort of thing. But unlike many blenders of porn and art, or of sex and strange comedy, Baker doesn’t add a slug of grimness, an ingredient he’s never cared for. ‘Observe, in short, how ...”

“... was a good deal of cash in the nexus between Carlyle and his main publisher in his years of fame. Chapman and Hall brought out a Uniform Edition of his works in sixteen volumes as early as 1858; they then followed up with 23 volumes of the Cheap Edition in the 1860s, the 34 volumes of the Library Edition in 1869-71, the 21 volumes of the Cabinet Edition in ...”

“... thought to have provoked lifelong neurosis about sex. The Companion does not record that George Meredith was instrumental in getting The Story of an African Farm published (poor old Meredith also loses his credit for helping Ouida and Marie Corelli into print). In her later career in England, the Companion portrays Schreiner’s relationships with ...”

“... are a nasty mixture of the pseud and the ruthless, with the Beatles giggling at their toes while George Martin organises the aural shifts of Sergeant Pepper, and with Lennon first ignoring his first wife and then citing her non-existent infidelity to get custody of his son Julian. It would have taken a Manhattan avant-gardist brought up as a scion of the ...”

“... polished bald heads. We don’t pay attention to the monster inflatables dressed in Gilbert and George outfits, attended by a squabble of kids and cameras. Art. It’s only art. A man in a tight suit is trying to force air into two face-painted condom figures. He is tethering them, reluctant windsocks, against the stiff breeze. And this again is Andrew ...”

“... Manilius was his chosen life-work, and when he finished it he seems to have felt about it much as Chapman did on finishing his Homer: ‘The work that I was born to do is done.’ He said repeatedly that the publication of the final volume left him nothing more to do; he would now (at 71) ‘do nothing for ever and ever’. In his well-known essay on ...”

“... of modern villas built on an ancient site known for its lakes, groves and blossoms. Dwight Chapman, Nixon’s appointments secretary, observed that Nixon seemed reluctant to meet Zhou Enlai’s eye as the two leaders exchanged pleasantries from adjacent sofas in Villa 18. In the early afternoon, a State Department interpreter noted that Nixon’s ...”

“... who recently became the agency’s director. Having served as its deputy executive director under George W. Bush, Brennan returned to government in 2008 as Obama’s chief counterterrorism adviser and, in some accounts, as a kind of father confessor, blessing the president’s lethal strikes as fully compliant with Catholic thinking about morally just ...”

“... and there seems an insatiable market for new versions, especially in English. According to George Steiner, in his Introduction to Homer in English, this particular ‘translation act ... surpasses in frequency that of any other act of transfer into any other Western tongue and literature’, including versions of the Bible. But how do you begin to put ...”

“... committed suicide in reaction to bereavement, is too confidently named as a possible guilty man. George Blake is said to have given away the secret tunnel built by the West in Berlin to tap Russian telephones, and to have done so even before it was built, so that in 1954-7 Western Intelligence was groaning under a misinformation mountain. A named senior MI 5 ...”

“... he had moved from Washington to live with and be cared for in the Camden home of his brother George and his wife Louisa. These years also marked the death of his favourite sister-in-law, Jeffe’s wife Mattie, and the devastating blow of his mother’s death. ‘The only staggering, staying blow & trouble I have had – but unspeakable – my physical ...”

“... for McCartney’s new lockdown solo album; various reflections on the fiftieth anniversary of George Harrison’s All Things Must Pass; various reflections on the fortieth anniversary of John Lennon’s death; a trailer for Peter Jackson’s new Beatles documentary, Get Back; a new documentary about Mark David ...”

“... the Green Room at San Quentin, the TV interviews – in which he looks like a wasted George Best carved out of rotten marzipan. Manson’s career proves, if nothing else, that satire has a strictly enforceable shelf-life. The high-risk conclusion to Watson’s epic is achieved when he comes face-to-face with the dying Zappa and his security ...”

“... for brother and sister to have separate bedrooms, all the neighbours seemed to be called Henry, George, Albert, Agnes, Gladys or Bessie and that ‘mothers obeyed the weekly rota which demanded that they scrubbed the stairways on their hands and knees.’ His was a respectable working-class family that had its values reinforced by the Daily Express. ‘My ...”

“... light itself turning into money. Stephen’s debt re-emerges during his argument with the poet George ‘A.E.’ Russell (one of his many creditors) as he stakes his fraught bid for literary inheritance to his own reserve and storehouse, the five-vowelled alphabet: A.E.I.O.U. In Burke’s pub and Bella Cohen’s brothel, Stephen is as spendthrift as the ...”