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“... but managed to be so – and this without much reference to age. I come fresh from reading Ray Monk’s enthralling biography of Wittgenstein, a man who lived for change and through change and put all his genius into it. The matter is very much on the minds of the authors of the new three-volume biography of D.H. Lawrence, of which John Worthen’s ...”

“... in Paris. A list of her friends, lovers and associates during these two decades is impressive. Man Ray photographed her, Jean Cocteau sketched her, Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot praised her work, Aleister Crowley exploited it. In the Twenties Harold Acton came across her in Paris, not exactly among ‘the bevies of truculent women’ who surrounded Hemingway and ...”

“... Allen Ginsberg’s star now shines more brightly than the rest. True, Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs glowed on in the aftermath of On the Road (1957) and Naked Lunch (1959); Brion Gysin, inventor of the cut-up technique, is still visible on a clear night. But the beautiful Lucien Carr, an Alain Delon lookalike drawn into the Beat circle by a ...”

“... growth of ayahuasca from an Amazonian practice to a drug of global interest. Since the 1950s, when William Burroughs visited in search of ayahuasca – ‘the ultimate fix’ – traditional representations have been joined by those of outsiders, and ayahuasca now pervades an international genre of psychedelic art in which Indigenous Amazonian themes merge ...”

“... One of the clinching confirmations of Anthony’s account of his wretched schooldays came from Sir William Gregory, who was at Harrow with him. On reading An Autobiography, Gregory recalled that Trollope was a big boy, older than the rest of the form, and without exception the most slovenly and dirty boy I ever met. He was not only slovenly in person and in ...”

“... wiped his nose on his sleeve, but he was not going to be treated like this by God or man. Reading William Taubman’s tremendous biography, I see that this sort of thing kept happening to Khrushchev. Take the grand picnic for the Writers’ Union in May 1957, one of his many catastrophic meetings with the Moscow intellectuals, at which, after a ...”

“... is a trading site for classic moments in basketball matches, like LeBron James dunking. William Shatner sold an X-ray of his teeth. I saw one developer offering NFTs of famous dates. Do you want to own Michael Jackson’s first moonwalk, on 25 March 1983? That’ll currently set you back 0.5 ether, or $1300. Bill ...”

“... According to this model, the Iraqi people are a blank sheet on which to inscribe the ideas of William Kristol, Robert Kagan and other deep thinkers of the Far Right. As I said in an earlier article for the LRB (17 October 2002), such ideas were first tried out by Ariel Sharon in Lebanon during the 1982 invasion, and then more recently in ...”

“... Science could project voices across the Atlantic, reveal the interior contours of objects by X-ray and formulate equations to explain the mysteries of motion, but only the poet could decipher the ‘radiant world’. Allied with the Imagists, though never entirely of their number, was the poet, philosopher, novelist and spiritualist May Sinclair, the ...”

“... Minnelli, Gregory Peck, Vincent Price, Robert Ryan, Edward G. Robinson, Donna Reed, Nicholas Ray, Robert Siodmak, Frank Sinatra, Sylvia Sidney, Claire Trevor, Franchot Tone, Walter Wanger, Keenan Wynn, William Wyler, Orson Welles, Billy Wilder, Jerry Wald and Robert Young. Ronald Reagan, a New Deal Democrat at the time ...”

“... his perforated stomach, along with bits of the stomach itself – but a US army surgeon called William Beaumont was nevertheless sent for. Beaumont was pessimistic, but he cleaned the wound as best he could and was amazed the next day to find his patient still alive. It was touch and go for almost a year: St Martin survived, though with a gastric fistula ...”

“... planetary orbits by thinking God’s thoughts after him, but obstructive in the 19th century, when William Whewell, Louis Agassiz and Richard Owen resisted the transmutation of species. Desmond’s informed analysis points to a more subtle conclusion. An idealist metaphysic may not have contributed to the science of evolutionary mechanics, but it did make a ...”

“... and the amazing detail of basket-handled swords. How many knew that dried fish-skin (especially ray-skin) was the preferred wrapping for gentlemen’s sword-hilts? Obsession with the repulsive details of blasting and carvery is another thing which has tended to distract people from what the battle was about. It plays too large a part in Peter Watkins’s ...”

“... of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (on the initiative of its bibliophile vice-president, Gordon Ray) acquired the literary correspondence of the publisher Richard Bentley and Sons, principal purveyor of the three-decker novel to the Victorian reading public. At the same time, the British Library (with financial assistance from the Friends of National ...”

“... to which the bookseller Walter Spencer added the initials ‘W.B.’ in the belief that it was by William Blake. Spencer was prone to such improvements and, as the caption admits with a note of resignation, ‘other spurious signatures on original drawings in the Courtauld collection’ can be traced back to him. At the most elaborate end are carefully ...”