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“... Compton-Burnett – has made this Victorian hybrid, the ‘ruling class’, so familiar that we forget how brief its existence was. A cross between a gentrified bourgeoisie and a professionalised aristocracy, it ranked as ‘upper-middle’ in the hierarchy of class. Mismanagement of the Crimean War in the 1850s provoked a crisis of confidence in the ...”

“... tide has suddenly turned. The tirade against Brussels from Mrs Thatcher’s former adviser, Sir John Hoskyns, was not well received by the Institute of Directors he was still serving. Opinion polls show and the results of the Euro-elections confirm that outright hostility to the Community is no longer an obvious winner. Mrs Thatcher is suffering both from ...”

“... address of Eric Hammond is unmistakable. He is here declining to be scared by a letter from Brenda Dean, ‘the pleasant woman at the helm of SOGAT’, trying to frighten him over EEPTU relations with Eddie Shah and Today. Hammond would eventually be expelled from the TUC and has, in many places where ice clinks against glass, become an object of disdain, just ...”

“... who told me her friend had once been Marilyn Monroe’s nurse – I’m not making this up – and we swapped addresses. I later wrote to her, asking if she could get me into the movies. Within a few weeks I got a letter from Lola Moore, for forty years the biggest kids’ agent in Hollywood. She represented Tommy Rettig, who was in River of No Return, Jon ...”

“... a rhinestone dog-collar.’ He was responding to Auden’s admonition on reading O’Hara’s and John Ashbery’s entries for the Yale Younger Poets Prize in 1955: ‘I think you (and John, too, for that matter) must watch what is always the great danger with any “surrealistic” style, namely of confusing authentic ...”

“... to grace half the magazine covers on any rack. He seemed hotter and more unstoppable than Howard Dean had during the early part of the 2004 presidential primaries, before the press and electronic media decided to destroy his candidacy. Dean frightened people, the people who count: he was principled, stubborn and ...”

“... can be to guide us 1988ers through the streets of Tower Hamlets as they were, and are, to him. We can walk with him downwind and eastwards from the Mansion House and are soon slowed by the all-pervading smell of poverty and filth as we traverse streets with the same names – Great Alie Street, Flower and ...”

“... positive, however small.    ‘I don’t always say what I think,’ was the answer. We walked on.    ‘We are leaving in any case,’ she said. It is deceptively simple, but oddly effective in conveying the fact that consciousness is not really an affair of feeling, emotion, action, but of something ...”

“... looks like a Post-It note to a friend, or versified notes on a Jackson Pollock painting, a James Dean movie or ‘the music of Adolphe Deutsch’. You may also get one of many enticing, informal, secretly-complex poems that sound like nobody else ever has: How can you start hating me when I’m so comfortable in your raincoat the apples kept bumping off the ...”

“... In his memoirs Roy Jenkins describes John Kennedy as the best President of the USA in the past four decades. It is a curious, not to say unfashionable verdict. The demolishers of the Kennedy legend have been carrying all before them in the past few years. So battered is the Kennedy reputation that it is almost time for a new school of revisionist historians to rehabilitate the myth of Camelot on the Potomac ...”

“... reality for ever melting into fantasy only to harden back into new reality. And in Lying together we learn that the original point of departure – the writer leaving for an assignation with a blind interpreter – was itself only a metaphor for creativity. Improvisational novels are risky from a market point of view. Most readers want firmer anchorage than ...”

“... to the catalogue an equally absurd extravaganza of name-dropping. (He meets everyone from James Dean, ‘one of the first people to encourage my art’, to Elias Canetti, ‘the writer of Auto da Fé, with whom I drank cups of coffee in the cafés of Hampstead, while discussing the merits of Chinese civilisation’.) Demos finds something facile in nomadic ...”

“... of tokens, or to invoke too easily the spectres of lost children and absent parents. Tacita Dean’s Found Fortress is a foot-wide piece of black and white embroidery, bought at a flea market in France, that shows a medieval, or mock-medieval, crenellated structure, with a tiny figure on horseback in the foreground. ...”

“... to the reckless domestic and international adventurism of his liberal successors. Admirers of John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson and of the dynamism of their years in office interpret the new defence of Eisenhower – correctly – as an assault on their own belief in active, affirmative government, an assault different in its origins but oddly similar in ...”

“... sacred extension of my own experience. ‘I should like to have been with them then,’ as we sang on Sundays. It was one of my favourite hymns. Without knowing it, I was catching the last breath of a vernacular tradition that had shaped English culture for centuries. Protestantism disapproved of pilgrimages to holy places, and had little time for the ...”