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“... Wilson), ‘wickedly funny’ (A.S. Byatt), ‘very nourishing entertainment’ (Dame Rebecca West). The manuscript’s progress through the hands of less enthusiastic publishers has been recorded in various gossip columns. Anne Smith, editor of the Literary Review, is a canny publicist for herself and her journal. Now, at last, we have this ...”

“... their families to the coast. The inspiration behind the scheme was George Lansbury, the subject of John Shepherd’s biography, a book as meticulous as it is generous. It is nonetheless timely: just as the prison service has brown-filled this pleasant site, so, too, New Labour has trampled on the radical socialism of which Lansbury was one of the finest ...”

“... with some ugly secrets): ‘Bring him back! ... Better not.’ The dedicatee of Life Stories is Rebecca West. When one recalls how affectionately she brought her father back in The fountain overflows, one concludes that Barker is her Blakean partner, the tank that contains. She wants to write an autobiography, but is unwilling to give anything away. As she ...”

“... where the Second Continental Congress is refusing to debate a proposal for American independence. John Adams hops back and forth, his diction slicing the King’s English into definitive new states. Thomas Jefferson, dressed in mauve, so sexual he can barely speak coherently, lounges on the window seat in a soft-focus rapist’s reverie, dreaming of not ...”

“... and the friends she acquired for herself and met through her first marriage, to publisher John Rodker, she could within reason command whatever pulpit, platform or stage she needed. Once free of the security and conventions of her home and the violent claims that the countryside all around it made on her emotions, and having then sloughed off her ...”

“... that Picasso, towards the end of his life, became addicted to all-in wrestling on the telly – as John Richardson informs us in the sympathetic account of those years (and brave attempt to defend Picasso’s late work) which appeared in the New York Review of Books on 19 July 1984. However private these sketchbooks were, they reveal, more and more as we ...”

“... Sally’) and Ezra Pound, who was indicted for broadcasting from Italy; in Britain, John Amery and P.G. Wodehouse, who was cold-shouldered for giving a jaunty talk about life in his internment camp. Lord Haw-Haw was the most notorious radio traitor of all, and many British people, in the charged atmosphere of the postwar months, seemed ...”

“... black velvet jacket, collar and tie. She was now in the orbit of Harland’s contributors and John Lane’s Keynotes – ‘George Etherton’, Evelyn Sharp, Netta Syrett and the languid but sharp-witted Ella D’Arcy. These young women were not Bohemians: they were dandies. They objected when Frederick Rolfe left lice on the furniture; Beardsley was ‘a ...”

“... this, Mahmoud Darwish once said that ‘a poem is a throw of dice on a patch of darkness.’ Rebecca Elson, an astronomer who was also a poet, offers this beautiful, precise variation on the theme in a notebook draft called ‘Explaining Dark Matter’: ‘As if, from fireflies one could infer the field.’ The active imagination in literature looks ...”

“... of 21 is the author of two novels. Vidal looks directly into the camera, sullen and contentious. John Chamberlain, who wrote the text, declares Stafford the ‘most brilliant’ of the lot. By this time she had published two novels; her career as a short-story writer was just getting under way. Unlike Capote and Vidal, Stafford never became a celebrity, and ...”

“... was the story of a woman’s life as a house slave on the North Carolina plantation of John Hill Wheeler, her escape to New Jersey in 1857, and her composition of an autobiographical fiction incorporating ‘elements of the many sentimental sagas she had evidently borrowed from Mr Wheeler’s shelf’. Although ‘replete with the heavy-handed ...”

“... from our heads/But when we first agreed to put them on’). As well as translating War Primer, John Willett, co-editor of the new Collected Works, has revised his volume of essays, Brecht in Context. Although hostile to John Fuegi’s argument, set out in The Life and Lies of Bertolt Brecht (1994), that Brecht’s ...”

“... John Fothergill, the high-handed host of the Spreadeagle at Thame between the world wars, described himself in Who’s Who as ‘Pioneer Amateur Innkeeper’. Evelyn Waugh, sending him a copy of Decline and Fall, inscribed it to ‘Oxford’s only civilising influence’. To those who, in 1931, goggled and giggled at his innkeeping confessions, Fothergill was the contumacious dandy for ever locked in combat with ‘clients’ who fell short of his standards, a man prepared to track down and rebuke a brigadier-general who, with his wife, dropped in to the Spreadeagle to use the lavatory without a please or thank you ...”

“... you write as you talk?’ Meredith was probably no more solipsistic than anyone else but, as John Bayley once nicely remarked in a review of the collected poems, his hallmark idiom is about as solipsistic as can be. The poetry celebrates open-air, big-hearted, honest and robust virtues, but its usual manner is contrived, self-absorbed, often deeply ...”

“... intent on shaping every detail himself. This upset ambitious directors. When Alfred Hitchcock made Rebecca, Spell-bound and The Paradine Case, he was told to stop ‘cutting in the camera’, and to shoot enough film for Selznick to control the editing. Not surprisingly, these were three of Hitchcock’s feebler films. Much of Selznick’s work was inspired by ...”