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“... should not be taken to suggest any idea of shortness. Fludd’s writings, said Anthony à Wood, sounding rather daunted, ‘were great, many and mystical’. His magnum opus was the Utriusque Cosmi Historia, which offered nothing less than a ‘technical, physical and metaphysical history of the macrocosm and the microcosm’. This appeared in parts ...”

“... rose into triple figures. Successively onto the scene came such butch illuminati as Miller, Michael Frayn and Peter Cook, with results that Mr Hewison obviously finds it much less uncomfortable to write about, even if it simultaneously becomes more difficult to trace the thread. These were and are real individuals, less easily subsumed into a ...”

“... magazine editors such as Kingsley Martin and Cyril Connolly, the editors of famous papers such as Michael Foot at the Evening Standard, the great publishers of the day, have all of them left their mark on the cultural history of the time. Their opposite numbers on radio remain to this day largely unknown, or, like Orwell, famous for other reasons. This ...”

“... Cameron called on institutions to devise their own ‘sensible rules’ about face veils, and Michael Wilshaw, the head of Ofsted, promised that schools would take a firm lead. He declared that ‘our liberal West values’ must be protected and added that ‘the Muslim community needs to listen’ because British society has come a long way ‘to ensure ...”

“... of One for My Baby is called Alfie (Parsons seems to be paying homage to characters played by Michael Caine). Alfie’s wife is called Rose. Rose dies on him. She was working in Hong Kong. In Man and Boy Harry’s misfortune led him to reassess his relationship with his young son and his parents and to fall in love with a woman who had a young daughter of ...”

“... next volume like crack,’ Zadie Smith writes. As the literary critic – and former junkie – Michael Clune has pointed out, we tend to reach for drug metaphors when we find ourselves taking pleasure in a book without being able to ascribe our interest to respectable literary values. Is Knausgaard, despite all the comparisons to Proust, more like reality ...”

“... on the nature of his feelings. Nor can he make sense of the enigmatic poetic off-cuts – ‘As wood-lice chew willows, So do mites bite pillows’ – that he retrieves from Cecil’s wastepaper basket. George is attached to Cecil ‘in the Cambridge way’, someone notes. When the pair sneak off to the woods for sex, the poet calls their grapplings ‘a ...”

“... of the text stands as a modifier.’ Among those uncomfortable with Gass’s position is James Wood, who responded that ‘to deny character with such extremity is essentially to deny the novel.’ There’s something fiendish about Gass’s approach to form, and this makes things difficult for anyone trying to figure out what’s going on in one of his ...”

“... steel), and figurines of small-town hominess – cute pets and farmyard animals – in polychrome wood. Objects in stainless steel and porcelain ranging from a bust of Louis XIV to a statuette of Bob Hope, from the folk figure of Kiepenkerl (a travelling pedlar in medieval Germany) to Michael Jackson and his pet chimp ...”

“... records the birthdays of various contemporary literary figures. Here is Dennis Potter on 17 May, Michael Frayn on 8 September, Edna O’Brien on 15 December, and so naturally I turn to my own birthday. May 9 is blank except for the note: ‘The first British self-service launderette is opened on Queensway, London 1949.’4 January. George F. tells me that ...”

“... away. Don’t try to get involved too closely. Otherwise you’ll get your fingers burnt.’ Ann Wood recalls: ‘you really needed just a little bit to be apart, or you really did risk annihilation.’ Rosemond Strode, Britten’s last amanuensis, speaks of Aldeburgh as a ‘flypaper’. The mental cruelties that Britten inflicted on people cannot be ...”

“... specify who my fellow modèles en gâteaux might be – the late Freddie Trueman I would guess, Michael Parkinson possibly and Alan Titchmarsh (who’s so amiable he might even do it). A candidate for pâtisserie posterity would once have been that son of Yorkshire Jimmy Savile who seemed made from marzipan. But not now. No cake for James.7 ...”

“... useful iron and steel objects were melted down into useless pig iron, or dying to save a log of wood.’ He now sees instead the sinister side of the old ‘folk religion’, ‘like an underground river of fire, coming to the surface ... when social and political structures are ... cracking’. Its essence, he says, is ‘a terrible vision of the present ...”

“... even at the Last Judgment, when they have dragged their bodies back from earth to the sorrowful wood, they will not, because of their sin, be allowed to reassume them. The bodies will merely be hung on their branches: ‘ciascuno al prun dell’ombra sua molesta’ (each on the thorn of its own molesting shade). The extra emblematic meaning of this line is ...”

“... at University College, Oxford, before he finally met W.H. Auden. It was not for want of trying. Michael, Spender’s elder brother, an insufferable turbo-brain at Balliol, had known Auden at school and kept in touch, but refused to arrange an introduction for Stephen, fearing, as Spender later put it, that ‘in producing me he would be playing the weakest ...”