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“... John Huston’s Beat the Devil. He, too, is ruthless and unsmiling, and finding Humphrey Bogart, Peter Lorre and Robert Morley cast up on his shores, plans to have them all shot. Bogart, however, discovers the sheikh’s soft spot, a secret passion for Rita Hayworth, and saves their lives by promising the humourless young man an introduction to ‘the ...”

“... literary affiliations in James Hogg, and in such a novel as George Douglas’s The House with the Green Shutters. These are certainly present in the more sensational side of his work. But Twenty Thousand Streets has a quite different and much more English atmosphere, finding its models (and they are very obviously to be detected) in Dickens, J.B. Priestley ...”

“... a poor thing if I thank them here alphabetically. They include Mr Gerald Albertini, The Rt Hon. Peter Archer MP, Miss Amanda Aspinall, Dr Robert Aspinall, The Duke of Atholl, Miss Julie Battersea, Mr Tom Begg, Dr Kurt Benirschke, Mr Robin Birley, Mr Anthony Blond, Mr Robert Boutwood, Mr Claus von Bülow, Mr Timothy Cassel, The Hon. Mr Alan Clark, Sir David ...”

“... of course, Victor proceeded to do, armed with a Bible and a carving knife. Morrison’s poem about Peter Sutcliffe is, on one level, a reworking of Auden’s ‘Victor’ which also manages to define the exact distance between Auden’s Thirties, and Morrison’s Eighties. Written in broad Yorkshire, in ringingly regular rhyme and metre, it looks, at first ...”

“... philanderer, and an insecure snob who was evasive about his origins as Richard Russ from Willesden Green. The son, another Richard, believed his father had adopted a new identity to hide his shame at having abandoned his family – including an infant daughter dying of spina bifida – in order to pursue an affair with the married woman who became his second ...”

“... language is one that we share with many other people – it is not a private language at all. Now Peter Hacker would express the thought differently, but in my opinion Rose and Hacker are not much at odds with each other. I do not think that Rose is philosophically tone deaf at all – but I did say that my prejudices are too close to his judgments for me to ...”

“... was spared to him – he fell beneath the first blow; and ere four days had passed since Rullion Green, the aged minister of God was gathered to his fathers. ‘Stevenson and Sons’, the maker’s mark on Edinburgh streetlamps (a company sideline), would always remind Stevenson of his failure to add to the family pride in a way which suited ...”

“... him, isn’t he?’ my granny would say. ‘Always had a dark side. Probably got it from his uncle Peter. He was like that as well. Morbid.’ ‘You’re just trying to draw attention to yourself,’ my father would say. ‘If something ever happens to you, I suppose you’ll want one of them statues to yourself up in the Glasgow Necropolis.’ ‘Yes,’ I ...”

“... the 1935 lyric ‘To Be Hungry Is to Be Great’: The small yellow grass-onion, spring’s first green, precursor to Manhattan’s pavements, when plucked as it comes, in bunches washed, split and fried in a pan, though inclined to be a little slimy, if well cooked and served hot on rye bread is to beer a perfect appetiser – and the best part of it is they ...”

“... of the Mario series), an Italian plumber (the eponymous Mario), his evil twin, Wario, and a small green dinosaur called Yoshi, and so on, all of the vehicles being driven by various friends and family members, and comprehensible and playable by anyone over the age of about four. Miyamoto has said he likes the idea of creating games a grandchild and a ...”

“... part of one when I was 12 or 13; I’d merely registered some of the titles on the spines of the green Penguin books on my parents’ shelves. This came as a shock – I’m still not sure why Marsh escaped me then, except that she may have seemed in some mysterious way more of a grown-up taste than Dorothy L. Sayers or Christie – but being a completist I ...”

“... a family paper and listening in when London’s radical intelligentsia (the Russian anarchist Peter Kropotkin, the Communard Louise Michel, the Fabian Annie Besant, and a host of suffragists and socialists) talked politics at their house on Russell Square. Emmeline started a business selling Arts and Crafts soft furnishings and decorations, but it ...”

“... goes by initials. Hilda Doolittle also wrote under pen names – Delia Alton, Edith Gray, Rhoda Peter and Helga Dart – but she never published under any of them. Inscribing herself as H.D.  (well before Ezra Pound ushered her into literary history as ‘H.D. Imagiste’) she wasn’t swerving from prejudicial gendering so much as ridicule ...”

“... Roundheads and jubilant Cavaliers, the explanation for all the cars some mock-battle in Green Park. Note how one passes these far from sheepish figures without a second glance; the kind of extraordinary feature of ordinary life that never gets into a film except as part of the plot.In the evening, read at St Mark’s, Primrose Hill in aid of the ...”

“... wielded by humanity. By the 1960s at the latest the new times were upon us, with the postwar ‘green revolution’ (the name may sound ironic today) well underway. Scientific farming encouraged galloping growth in human numbers, through higher crop yields; the breakneck urbanisation of the global South, as redundant farmworkers swelled the cities; and ...”