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“... Portnoy’s Complaint I’m not surprised at Dad’s reaction when he found it in my bookcase at Wood Lane fifty years ago. In some misguided missionary zeal that makes me cringe even to remember I may actually have recommended it. Because if it shocked him then it shocks me now, though I don’t imagine he read more than a few pages before putting it back ...”

“... He has his moments of triumph, however. There is the ‘slightly comic Governors’ meeting of Wood-bridge School’ at which the tercentenary celebrations are discussed. ‘What big noise shall we try to get?’ Various names are put forward. Lord Nugent? ‘My first pupil,’ Lyttelton says. The Lord Chamberlain, Eric Penn? ‘He was in my house.’ Sir ...”

“... Frederick, Prince of Wales, the artists Hogarth and Hayman, the designers Gravelot and George Michael Moser, the sculptor Louis-François Roubiliac and the composers Arne and Handel: ‘The brash light-heartedness, the unwillingness to follow rules, the energy, informality and experimentation that were intrinsic to Vauxhall are all typical of the English ...”

“... by Alan Walker.* I was also reading – for amusement – the biography of Lytton Strachey by Michael Holroyd and one of Dorothy Parker by Marion Meade. In Holroyd’s book, I was most struck by some portraits – reproduced in full colour – that had been done of Strachey; there’s one by Simon Bussy, drawn in 1904 (the year of Isherwood’s ...”

“... with interest. Since it opened to the public in 1985, the Saatchi collection in St John’s Wood has become a focus of what’s called the contemporary art debate. With every purchase, names are made and names are called. But Saatchi’s taste, his collecting policy, is eclectic and elusive. So much art, of so many kinds, has passed into and sometimes ...”

“... report’s author, Peter Clarke. Last summer, when he was still secretary of state for education, Michael Gove floated the idea of requiring schools to teach British values. In November, the DfE issued what it called ‘strengthened guidance’ on ‘promoting British values in schools’ – a necessary move, according to Lord Nash, the schools ...”

“... Edison survived to the age of 84 on meals weighing no more than four or five ounces.)Humphry Davy, Michael Faraday, and others like them, had made science fashionable, popular and hugely exciting. Edison and his schoolfellows began experimenting with chemical reactions. At the age of 12, with the help of a friend, he built a half-mile-long telegraph line ...”

“... Bill Ladd had been ill for ages. I was looking at the floor, made up of narrow strips of wood in repeated V shapes. My father said: ‘Mummy est morte.’I realise now that he wanted me to know that my mother was dead before he saw me. He wanted my absorption of the news to have begun by the time we came face to face. Those three words, ‘Mummy is ...”

“... 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 epiphany (Charlton Heston breaking down at the sight of the half-buried Statue of Liberty at the end of Planet of the Apes is ...”

“... her parentage at her baptism 11 years after her mother’s death, and the parish register for St Michael, Queenhithe, in the City of London, records: ‘Laura daughter of William Jerdan and Letitia Elizabeth Landon’. Asked for her father’s profession or rank, Laura appears to have been unsure what to say. The beginnings of ‘Manufacturer’ and ...”

“... as Lucas points out, has produced a flourishing literature of poems about arguments about wood – ‘Goody Blake and Harry Gill’, but see also Harley MS 2253, ‘the wodeward waiteth us wo that loketh under rys’ – as of poems about enclosures and deserted villages and customary rights, or poems about felled poplars (Cowper), fallen elms ...”

“... abound. Dead Men’s Morris (1936) – reissued in the ‘Classic Collection’ marking Michael Joseph’s 50th anniversary – is quite untypically straightforward and subdued, though it isn’t without moments of ebullience. One of these occurs when the elderly detective, needing assistance to get her nephew Carey out of a predicament in the ...”

“... of the term ‘Elves’, as also for his shabby dealing with the splendid notion of Great Birnam wood advancing upon high Dunsinane hill. The Merton Professor of English Language and Literature admits with some complacency to ‘not being specially well read in modern English’ and to ‘no interest at all in the history or present situation of the English ...”

“... is not, and the episode is told from Stan’s point of view – seem to enter the territory of Michael Haneke’s Caché, but Ridgway’s story is subtler, less gothic. Stan always knows who’s sending the pictures; eventually he confronts Gary, who works in B&Q but is trying to make it as a photographic chronicler of the everyday. Stan feels wrongly ...”

“... in the cold. Another downer is the smell, which one worker described to her as ‘cardboard, wood, foam insulation, oil, and what I always just think of as the smell of cold’. Before reading Twilley’s book, I had imagined that these places wouldn’t smell of anything much. But apparently some frozen foods are surprisingly pungent and can transfer ...”