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“... it could have belonged to someone else with the same initials – the Stratford draper William Smith, for instance – but the possibility remains strong that it was Shakespeare’s. It is certainly a genuine ring of the period, and there are other pointers in its favour. The field where it was found, Mill Close, was on land that Shakespeare had owned: it ...”

“... attention and delight that looks into the Betjeman world and sees church interiors and Pams and Joan Hunter-Dunns. But metre and manner preclude those bursts of lyric magnificence: Betjeman essays the mock-sententious. He becomes knowing, over-conscious, collusive with the reader; the local and parodic tone invites a mockery of its own world, and of course ...”

“... of implying that a home visit in old age from Kurt Cobain or a graveside serenade from Patti Smith has the same cultural importance as the writing of Nova Express and The Wild Boys. Burroughs’s actual achievement seems incidental to the glitzy mythologising of his remaining intimates, though still a bone of contention gnawed by literati. Hardly ...”

“... Or were they hooked up to a truth in the objective world, whose creator ensured their existence? Joan of Arc’s trial returned obsessively to this problem: were the voices in her mind, in which case they might have been conjured by the arch deceiver, Satan? Or were they ghosts of the sort who often appeared to warn sinners to reform – no diabolical tricks ...”

“... Promised Land it’s vodka or cognac. During the doomed love affair in Arch of Triumph, Ravic and Joan drank Calvados in such quantities that the novel – a bestseller – touched off an American sales boom so wild that Normandy ran out of apples (the producer who filmed the book is supposed to have ordered 54 cases of the stuff on set). Remarque was a ...”

“... no one ever died with warm feet.’ O. Henry slowly raised his head from the pillow, commented ‘Joan of Arc did,’ and promptly expired. The promptness of expiry is typical of the genre, eliding the gap of time between last words and last breath. It’s an exemplary piece of narrative, with the master of the short-story surprise ending providing one, off ...”

“... said she was ‘baffled’ by her own behaviour – she had a much nicer TV set at home. Shonola Smith, 22, pleaded guilty, along with her sister and a friend, to ‘entering’ Argos in Croydon: ‘The tragedy is that you are all of previous good character,’ the judge said, as he sentenced them to six months each. Chelsea Ives, the 18-year-old ‘shamed ...”

“... writes that ‘during the years-long squabble over which of us lady writers would become the next Joan Didion, no one had tried to claim the title of David Foster Wallace for girls’ – why? The answer is obvious: too sweaty. Wallace perspires freely in the foreground, while Paltrow perches mauve-and-beigely on her stool on a far stage. He is dead and she ...”

“... dramaturg. ‘How shall we slaughter the little bastard?’ snorted Olivier, handing his letter to Joan Plowright, whom he had married in the interim. Tynan had contributed, Olivier believed, to his – Olivier’s – first wife’s mental breakdown by his derisive reviews. More recently, he had attacked the Chichester Festival, under cover of which Olivier ...”

“... of their relations to each other. Hockney, in a recent radio conversation with Edward Lucie-Smith, drew attention to the marvellous painting of the mother teaching her child to walk. In the distortions of the mother’s face one sees all the anxiety and love a mother has for her child as he begins, literally, to move away from her: in the equally ...”

“... Pound, Virgil and Sextus Propertius.’ He also introduced his girlfriend to Andy Warhol, Jack Smith, Carolee Schneemann. ‘Her eyes opened wide.’In later years, Acker often said that she had studied linguistics under Roman Jakobson. This wasn’t true, Kraus thinks: Jakobson taught at Harvard, which didn’t take girls until the mid-1970s. Acker ...”

“... When his son was born Jones decided he would change his name because ‘some names like Jones and Smith have lost the first function of a name, that is to separate them from other people.’ He decided to ‘amplify’ his name to Beddow-Jones. Once Freud had poured elaborate and mocking scorn on this – ‘I only know that you will continue to be Ernest ...”

“... The film version of A Taste of Honey invents a street carnival to take the drama out-of-doors (in Joan Littlewood’s original production, the entire action took place in an indoor set), while Get Carter! – a brutal crime melodrama set exotically in Newcastle-upon-Tyne – takes time off from its sex-and-violence fantasies to dwell lovingly on a Kalamazoo ...”

“... was powerful enough, I avoided power. Then Mark stopped being the editor and there was Godfrey Smith, and then Magnus Linklater, both of whom were very nice. I was then called senior editor. The other day I went to see James Fox, who had the French edition of White Mischief, which I come into. He’d put originally that Francis Wyndham, one of the senior ...”

“... she didn’t write about her second marriage to the homosexual Foreign Office worker Eric Earnshaw Smith, her third marriage to the straying Tom Hopkinson, the palaver over Silas Glossop, the father of her children, her affairs with George Barker, David Gascoyne, Eric Siepmann, Ronald Moody, Basil Nicholson, Ian Henderson ... And she could never write about ...”