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“... lecture called ‘Writing American Fiction’ at a small community college in Monmouth, Oregon. A close buddy from my graduate school days at the University of Chicago was teaching there and had arranged the invitation. I accepted not only because of the opportunity the trip afforded me to see, for the first time in five years, my friends Bob and Ida Baker ...”

“... Radcliffe and the housing-estate boy, Victor Tolson, become obsessed with each other. They become close while working for a tent contractor, Ewbank, who later turns up in The Contractor. The play tells the story of a gang of marquee builders working at a wedding. The Royal Court summoned the tent company Storey himself had worked for in Wakefield to show the ...”

“... and prone to self-destruction. Wieners himself remembered taking the ferry to Provincetown with Frank O’Hara: ‘We stood again below deck by the hectic Atlantic cutting at our feet, speaking of Hart Crane and the last words we would have in our mouths at that moment of surrender.’ His idol was Billie Holiday, who gives the name to one of his best short ...”

“... conversation, from court gossip, reports of his hunting prowess and the tunes of seguidillas, to frank discussions of masturbation and some remarkable doodles, including a self-portrait of Goya smoking a cigarette. The two men exchanged drawings of their penises (‘Jesus! What a testimony!’ Goya marvelled on receiving Zapater’s letter). During an ...”

“... pompousness and authority and rules and regulations; the little girl offered him a vehicle. The frank pleasure he shows in the spirited, defiant, capricious indocility of his heroines – both in the books and the photographs – does not tally at all with the ideal of Victorian maidenliness, even though Carroll often referred to his child friends in those ...”

“... circles, and struck up friendships with Willem de Kooning, Allen Ginsberg, Yoko Ono, Robert Frank and the great figurative painter Bob Thompson, who shared his love of jazz. He was a pivotal influence on a student at Syracuse, Lou Reed; another close listener was a composition student at Juilliard, Philip Glass. Yet ...”

“... but of the anti-racist consensus too. What got her into trouble was ‘Getting In and Out’, a frank investigation, included in this collection, into the proprietorship of black pain. Like almost all of Smith’s essays, the piece is interested in several things at once: it is partly a straightforward and mostly laudatory review of Jordan Peele’s ...”

“... overwhelmingly ignored. As a result, it is extremely difficult, and mostly impossible, to hold any frank discussion of the most important issue affecting the position of the US in the Middle East or the open sympathy for terrorism in the region. A passionately held nationalism usually has the effect of corrupting or silencing those liberal intellectuals who ...”

“... Memoir Club was formed neither the Age of Victoria nor Strachey’s youth were so mesmerisingly close. ‘Lancaster Gate’ is a compound of relief, regret and a certain tenderness, evoked in the opening by Strachey’s account of a recurring dream. In it he is once more in the house at Lancaster Gate. Asleep he is ‘positively delighted’ to be back even ...”

“... determinism whereby altitude becomes a ready predictor of state centralisation and reach. He comes close to this on quite a few occasions, but draws back. A second issue is that altitude may not be significant in and of itself, but be just one of many natural obstacles to the deploying of state technologies. Marshlands, deserts or even large bodies of water ...”

“... in which Pacifica carries Mrs Copperfield into the sea. At times the narrative voice comes close to free indirect style, but more often the characters observe and discuss themselves and one another with a detachment caricaturing that of a third-person narrator: one of her threatening men reminds Christina ‘of certain comedians who are at last given a ...”

“... A Little Spasm and Whims promoted a Wildean cult of decadence, and were mocked by the naturalist Frank Norris in his novel The Octopus as ‘little toy magazines’. Symbolist-inspired bibelots appeared in Berlin, St Petersburg, Copenhagen, Lisbon, Alexandria and elsewhere. Around the same time, the market for publications was exploding. It’s estimated ...”

“... Homeresque epithets (every attractive woman is a ‘hardbody’ with ‘big tits’); sudden frank (and probably fake) declarations of emotion. Of course, the book also contains scenes of unparalleled repulsiveness: multiple rape-murders, dismemberments, disembowelments and the like. That several small logical impossibilities, scattered ...”

“... and ghost dances. He acquired the services of Ginsberg, Burroughs, Jean-Louis Barrault, Robert Frank, Ornette Coleman and Ravi Shankar. And he called his film Chappaqua. Ferlinghetti’s Aunt Emily removed him from the orphanage when she was taken on as French governess to the daughter of Presley Eugene Bisland, whose father-in-law founded Sarah Lawrence ...”

“... in politics. Not that the Young Conservatives were aimless sybarites. To the Tory journalist Frank Johnson they were just as zealous in their own way as Maoists – ‘a ruthless organisation dedicated to one fanatical aim: marriage’. Tim Bale’s latest book, The Conservatives since 1945, examines the motors of change within the party at every level ...”