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“... about lying in the long grass at the edge of the playground with his friends Richard and Roger, ‘trying to fart at will’; about avoiding Julie, ‘who liked to pounce on innocent-looking kids and ask them the Question – “D’you know what having it off means?”’; about the time Francis ‘crept onto the landing and kissed Aslan’s ...”

“... took his editorial role to be. The need for editorial intervention was far more clearcut with Roger Sales’s book on the Romantic period. It’s hard to envisage what went on in Williams’s mind when he let this one through. True, Sales obeys the editorial brief in one respect better than Coleman does: he writes free-wheeling essays on themes he ...”

“... stuck it on auto-repeat for whole frazzled nights at a time. It was the British light entertainer Roger Whittaker’s ‘The Last Farewell’. Presley may genuinely not have realised how far gone into addiction he was, because unlike most addicts he never had to go without. With his very own circle of tame doctors (the kind Burroughs would call ‘real ...”

“... her, we see him, out of focus, emerge from the dust of the bomb-blast. The shot is well framed – Roger Pratt deserves his Oscar nomination for cinematography – and the scene is much the most powerful in the film. It almost makes Michael Nyman’s hyperbolic score (the music in Planet of the Apes is subtle by comparison) tolerable. In all such scenes of ...”

“... lack of large-mindedness ‘does not prevent Updike from imagining him largely’, as Roger Sale put it in the New York Times, though they are stretched when very literary formulations are meant to be Ben’s unspoken words: ‘Each tree stands in a ragged oval of leaf-fall, summer’s discarded yellow petticoat.’ This seems too sharply ...”

“... on ‘Belief and Ritual’ is fascinating. Anyone who has read A.S. Byatt’s Ragnarok (2011), or Roger Lancelyn Green’s Myths of the Norsemen (1960), or even followed the Marvel Comics series Thor, will already know about Odin and Loki, fire giants, frost giants and the Midgard Serpent. But it’s astonishing how much of what we know comes from a single ...”

“... child, and although it is not a historical book Forguson includes chapters on G.E. Moore and Reid. Roger Gallie’s book Thomas Reid and the ‘Way of Ideas’ rambles most unhelpfully at times, and would have benefited considerably from the use of a spelling checker. Nevertheless it too may be saluted in passing as another sign of the increasing interest in ...”

“... attitude towards her heroine adopted by such right-royal writers of an earlier generation as Roger Fulford. And she is no less critical of the condescending tone that characterised Aspinall’s highly selective edition of Mrs Jordan’s letters, which also unduly influenced subsequent writers (notably Brian Fothergill) who depended on them. Above ...”

“... to Mike Molloy, a Mirror reporter. Molloy confronts Gould, who refers him to his solicitor, Sir Roger Pelham. A few minutes later when the phone rang again Raymond still hadn’t moved. He picked up the receiver, his hand still shaking. Pelham confirmed that Molloy had been in touch with him.      ‘I presume you made no comment,’ said ...”

“... with the Mediterranean, an injustice which the Collected Poems, intelligently edited by Roger Bowen, seeks to put right. The volume shows how travel encouraged in Spencer both a casual, accumulative mode of observation, the poet noting with curiosity what other travellers might miss or think unworthy of mention (a watchdog on a building-site, a ...”

“... he was the one with the camera. ‘Anyone could be in that suit,’ the Guardian’s Jonathan Jones said of the picture of Aldrin. ‘It is a portrait of humanity evolving before our eyes into something new and extraordinary. It’s as if the moon’s surface has overwhelmed Aldrin’s face, or even become it.’ I’m not so sure: I see only Aldrin. That ...”

“... and useful work. The Song Index and Discography in his book are by other people (S.J. Estes and Roger Ford); Shelton himself prefers ersatz social history (‘The year 1960 was after Joe McCarthy, before Eugene McCarthy. After the beats, before the hippies. After the Old Left, before the New Left. After Campbell’s soup, before Andy Warhol …’) or ...”

“... and a humbug he was never quite sure how serious he was intending to be. When the Irish rebel Roger Casement was about to go on trial for the capital crime of high treason for his part in the Easter Rising of 1916, Shaw wrote a speech for him to read out in court in his own defence. The intention was that Casement, as O’Toole writes, ‘would literally ...”

“... from him of his arrangements in Hull – principally the depth of his involvements with Monica Jones and Maeve Brennan, walk-on grotesques as far as Amis was concerned – and can’t have been pleased by hints here and there of Larkin’s reservations about the Amis works and life. In Amis’s correspondence with Conquest, and more covertly in his Memoirs ...”

“... qualities of sense and sensibility the commemoratee would have relished. There is, for instance, Roger Lonsdale, presenting with due flourish a work by the painter and art theorist Jonathan Richardson the elder, and illuminating Richardson’s own little-known life (down to a new birth-year) as well as the career of his young friend Pope. Lonsdale never ...”