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“... soap: Allan Stewart, wielder of the pick-axe; Michael Mates, sender of the famous watch; Norman Lamont, evictor (with some help from the tax-payer) of the tenant with too colourful a professional life; Patrick Nicholls, suspected drunk driver; Nicholas Ridley, too loquacious an advocate of anti-German feeling; and Mrs Edwina Currie (‘most of the ...”

“... muse in tow, or by themselves, they kinged it in smoky pubs. Hard to imagine the sly and brilliant Norman MacCaig whingeing on about his masculinity. Now, however, earlier feminist explorations are being rediscovered in the late stories of Margaret Oliphant and the novels of Willa Muir and Catherine Carswell. Young women writers are finding that they have a ...”

“... remain so bitter. The United States abandoned the South to its fate in 1991, while General Norman Schwarzkopf was only miles away. Ali Hassan al-Majid, Saddam’s Reinhard Heydrich, oversaw the ruin of the rebellious Shiites’ homes and the torture of their children. Unlike the Kurds, the southern Shiites have remained under Saddam’s rule since ...”

“... Bodley, were on the Victoria Embankment, where they were joined by New Scotland Yard, designed by Norman Shaw. Both buildings were masterpieces of the red-brick, post-Gothic styles generally grouped under the label Queen Anne, which White identifies as the predominant expression of up-to-date London after 1870. Meanwhile, the culture, morals, living standards ...”

“... made him famous. He quickly came to command large advances. Here’s a sample – taken from Norman and Jeanne MacKenzie’s Life of H.G. Wells: The Time Traveller (1973) – of his subsequent dealings with publishers, in this case from 1899 to 1901: ‘For When the Sleeper Wakes he had £700 for the serial rights and £500 on account from Harper for the ...”

“... waned but he saw out five of Henry’s queens and any number of ministers and favourites. In Mary Rose, his book about Brandon’s third wife, David Loades says: ‘He was present everywhere, but it is hard to pinpoint what he actually did.’ Throughout his career Charles accumulated grand-sounding titles, which confused outsiders into overestimating his ...”

“... The​ world was rigged against Delmore Schwartz. His mother, Rose, was to blame. After all, it was she who decided on his first name – the ‘crucial crime’, and an expression, he felt, of her ‘brazen gaucheness’, her botched attempt to assimilate into American society. ‘I never heard anybody call him “Schwartz”,’ Dwight Macdonald recalled ...”

“... gives us a picture of the world he came from. His deployment of a fishing-boat name, The Golden Rose, suggests a milieu with its own sense of splendour, offsetting rigid Presbyterianism. The poem ends with the beauty of ‘A moon/hard and high/above a marsh.’ This combination of absurdity, sparkle, implied hurt and grace was characteristic of Iain ...”

“... and binding machinery that solved the nagging labour shortage in the Midwest. Grain imports rose from only 2 per cent of Britain’s total supply in the 1830s to 45 per cent in the 1880s (65 per cent for wheat) and went on rising remorselessly. Already by 1900, wheatfields covered only half the acreage of 1872. The First World War and German U-boats ...”

“... love cities the way Frank O’Hara loved New York. Crawford, like his nearest literary forebear Norman MacCaig, loves places both rural and urban: in his work, he can throw his voice ‘deep down the larynx of Glen Esk’, and he can marry Iona, or bring the reader into close contact with his ‘Inner Glasgow’, a place of abolished pit bings and empty ...”

“... walked around for days exhilarated by the change in the literary weather.’ He was encouraging of Norman Mailer without puffing him up, and he was also worried for him: ‘Mailer’s performance here’ – in Advertisements for Myself – ‘reminds me of the brilliant talker who impresses the hell out of you at a cocktail party but who, when he turns his ...”

“... would bring fewer bills to cash, since they would be worth less. In this way, as discount rates rose, credit got tighter, and less money would be put into the economy. This would cause prices to fall, making local goods cheaper to foreign buyers and the cost of foreign goods more expensive. Again, exports would rise, imports would fall, and gold would flow ...”

“... Shima’s House of All Nations. Reliable newspapermen had kept the score.’ Maybe so, although Norman Mailer said that Hecht was ‘never a writer to tell the truth when a concoction could put life in his prose’. In her new biography, Adina Hoffman claims he was ‘as voracious for words as he was for girls – which was saying a very great deal’. In ...”

“... persons. The president was Dr – or, as he prefers, for he is proud of being a surgeon – Mr Norman Haire. Avies Platt Norman Haire, even to progressives, is an extraordinary, I might even say an incalculable being. He considered himself, and probably was, the only really qualified, practising sexologist in ...”

“... 16 respectively their mother took them with her on a trip to Italy, following in the footsteps of Norman Douglas and accompanied by her admirer and mentor Irving Davis. When Davis’s stepdaughter joined them she objected to the children’s presence and so unworried was Gray about them that she gave them £20 and told them to hitchhike back to London. It ...”