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“... biological peculiarities, was colonised around the year 400 by Polynesians; by the time Captain Cook arrived in 1778, it was home to some 300,000 people. The archipelago that Darwin visited was by no means virginal, nonetheless. Two hundred of Ecuador’s criminals were held in a penal settlement on Charles Island (modern Floreana); mariners had introduced ...”

“... letters, packed with insight and wonderful phrases, are quoted in Brett Millier’s biography, in David Kalstone’s Becoming a Poet and in Lorrie Goldensohn’s Elizabeth Bishop: The Biography of a Poetry. ‘What one seems to want in art, in experiencing it, is the same thing that is necessary for its creation, a self-forgetful, perfectly useless ...”

“... If the publishers thought they were going to get the kind of sputtering firework that one of David Frost’s script associates might help him deliver into a tape-recorder, they haven’t. This is a book meant to be read and even kept. Indeed it might have more keepers than readers, since a probable majority of buyers will be the people mentioned in the ...”

“... directed by Niels Arden Oplev; an American version is apparently in the works, to be made by David Fincher. There are some good performances here, especially by Noomi Rapace as the glamorously mean and punky Lisbeth Salander, but the real interest of the film in relation to The Ghost Writer is in how written it feels. The weight of a crowded novel is ...”

“... liquid bottle (‘cleans, no added promises’) on a fire. Words rear up and loom enormous – David Cameron, for example, may find this with his plan for ‘thrifty government’ – and fizz and collapse and make a nasty smell. It is, I take it, obvious that one of the many things no one particularly needs at the moment is a book that tells you how to ...”

“... more manacled by the observances of etiquette.’ On less grand occasions they met the painter David, an Englishman who had befriended Charlotte Corday at her trial, and Charles James Fox – ‘rather lourd and maladroit’. With the help of a young American, Margaret and Katherine visited Tom Paine, ‘up half a dozen flights of stairs, in a remote part ...”

“... When the Roman emperor Vitellius was deserted in his last moments by everyone except his cook, the aristocratic historian Tacitus could not bring himself to mention the actual occupation of so undignified a member of society. As Peter Burke points out in a friendly but sceptical contribution to People’s History and Socialist Theory, under such circumstances ‘people’s history’ was a contradiction in terms ...”

“... conglomerates have had to let it go. The Oxford University Press feel no obligation to keep David Gascoyne’s Collected Poems in print. Faber and Faber get along very nicely on Tom Eliot’s singing and dancing pussy-cats. The Cambridge Festival (don’t tell them) is nowhere, it isn’t happening. What’s the story? Even the participants don’t ...”

“... intimidated two other African Americans, Conley’s girlfriend and the husband of Frank’s cook, into retracting evidence favourable to the accused man, who was duly sentenced to death. A massive national campaign to force a new trial failed before the Georgia and US Supreme Courts, while the former Populist Tom Watson used his newspaper to whip up ...”

“... was more overt than the course followed by Georg Forster. Born in 1754, Forster accompanied James Cook on his second voyage and wrote an account of the trip in 1777 that found an enthusiastic response in Britain and Germany. After posts in Kassel and Vilna as a professor of natural sciences, he became librarian to the Elector of Mainz in 1788, and with the ...”

“... wince at his blunders (he thought he might send Milady to Botany Bay a century and a half before Cook landed there) or who simply don’t believe he could have written, or even dictated, all the books he published. To take one example: between March 1844 and August 1845, he wrote and published The Three Musketeers, The Count of Monte-Cristo, Twenty Years ...”

“... on the university novel, explores the intricate web of relationships which form around Mina Cook, an undergraduate at a fictional Oxford college.Two Thousand Million Man-Power (1937), the fifth novel Trevelyan published, is something else again. Robert Thomas, recently graduated from the School of Chemistry and Mathematics at London University, gets a ...”

“... Sex Pistols as Johnny Rotten or Sid Vicious, eclipsing the group’s musical muscle: drummer Paul Cook, guitarist Steve Jones and bassist Glen Matlock. (It was Matlock who wrote nearly all the group’s best tunes, only to be pushed out for being a Beatles-loving middle-class namby.) Andrew Loog Oldham, who managed the Rolling Stones, was the crucial ...”

“... other two novelists under review are more blatant in this respect, since both Michèle Roberts and David Grossman have written novels which pivot on the sentimental privileging of authorship. ‘I want to tell you my stories. I want to record my life with you. I want to give myself a history,’ insists one of Roberts’s narrators, a contemporary writer ...”

“... leader. Would he – could he? – perform the countless vital tasks that come naturally to David Cameron or Tony Blair: everything from how to comport yourself at the despatch box to the best way to climb out of a chauffeur-driven car, from how to use an autocue to knowing which pop band to choose on Desert Island Discs. If you don’t know which tie ...”