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“... from the blow, riddled with ambivalence as he must have been. He was helped in his recovery by a young French admirer, Françoise Laffitte-Cyon. But here, too, ironies abound. With Françoise’s help, Ellis began to come to terms with the fact that his own sexual focus did not concentrate on the act itself, but somewhere else. In some startling private ...”

“... of contents (Solie has wonderful titles: ‘Your News Hour Is Now Two Hours’ or ‘Cardio Room, Young Women’s Christian Association’ or ‘Your Premiums Will Never Increase’. As good as anything by Eno). I am floundering. The only reservation I have about the book is that it leaves out a number of other, equally marvellous poems. Perhaps that’s ...”

“... film’s producer, David O. Selznick, announced that he would launch a nationwide search for the young woman who would play Scarlett O’Hara. The move provoked a furore; Margaret Mitchell’s novel, published in 1936, was already a national bestseller – it seemed that everyone was reading it – and the desire to star in the movie version proved ...”

“... alternatives. This third story is called ‘Pauline de S.’, and opens the collection. A young man learns that an old friend is dying, and pays her a visit. He prepares himself by imagining how she must be feeling – no, how she should be feeling – and gets things hopelessly wrong. Surely the proximity of death inverts all our ...”

“... that wounds you, bores you or carries you away.’ In this language we may hear something of the young girl’s father, disobeyed in the letter but followed in the spirit. Who could resist the destructive and the demonic? Though I’m not sure about the clinging.Kristeva likes apparent contradictions, though hers aren’t as unruly as those we find in ...”

“... the mind inside the narrative voice might also be that of our hero, Frédéric Moreau, a depressed young man on his way ...”

“... a huge 11 per cent lead among women. In other words, if the electorate had consisted entirely of young women aged 18-24 there would now be a Labour Parliamentary majority of over a hundred. That all this should be happening under the first woman prime minister is not the least ironic aspect of the situation. The sociology of the election as it affects our ...”

“... been reissued as rather grand paperbacks, along with an eighth, a final hardback selection made by Michael Bloch. They all have titles like Ancestral Voices, Caves of Ice, Through Wood and Dale, Midway on the Waves and Prophesying Peace, and it will not escape the notice of the literate public that they are all derived, one with a bit of a spin on it, from ...”

“... comedies made at Ealing Studios in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Indeed, as Stubbs reminds us, Michael Balcon, the studio’s head in its heyday, was explicit in defining its mission. When Ealing was sold in 1955, he placed a plaque on the studio building that read: ‘Here during a quarter of a century many films were made projecting Britain and the ...”

“... an ordinary miracle he would never forget. Prosser describes this ‘ordinary miracle’ to the young daughter of the house he lodges in, and Jean Serjeant is at once doomed not to forget it either. She never quite makes up her mind what it is about Prosser’s tale that moves her most. Is it the twice-risen sun, or is it the heroic image of Prosser in his ...”

“... Though it does not say so, Michael Powell’s 700-page autobiography is merely the first volume of a work which Powell rather surprisingly tells us is ‘what my mother would have wished and what I was born for’. Surprising not for the reference to his mother, since he always speaks of her with the greatest affection and respect, but for the seeming dedication to letters in a man who never ceases to proclaim his lifelong devotion to images ...”

“... gang killed 14 Catholics in the Millfield district of Belfast after a constable was shot. Although Michael Collins brought these killings to the attention of Winston Churchill during the London negotiations, Nixon was never arrested or charged. He became an embarrassment only when Sir James Craig and the Unionist hierarchy got involved with the Governments of ...”

“... There are the incongruities of grammar and phrase books for those tormented but still pellucid young sensibilities to struggle with. La Normandie est renommée par ses falaises et ses fromages.     What are Normandy, cliffs, cheeses and fame? Too many words on the look-out for too many meanings.     Too many syllables for the tongue to ...”

“... The young Noel Coward thought E. Nesbit was ‘the most genuine Bohemian I had ever seen’. Berta Ruck called her ‘the Duchess’. Nesbit set herself up as the complete Edwardian: a free-thinker, a matriarch and a madcap. She bobbed her hair, carried her tobacco in a corset box, and acquiesced in her Fabian husband’s disdain for the suffragettes: ‘Votes for women ...”

“... the Hungarian Communist Party in December 1918, his admirers were taken by surprise. This gifted young man from an affluent Jewish background, then aged 33, had previously devoted himself exclusively to cultural pursuits. After coming into prominence around 1905 as one of the instigators of the Hungarian intellectual revival, he had gone on to make his mark ...”