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“... out hundreds of Christmas cards. Despite giants of jazz singing such as Billie Holliday and Ella Fitzgerald, this branch of music remains essentially a masculine preserve – again, this is a subject Val Wilmer frequently touches, but never seems to grasp – and from Donald Spoto’s life of Lotte Lenya it seems that the music-theatre of Kurt Weill, for all ...”

“... previous novel, Old Filth: both are about the same people, and some of the same stories recur. Edward Feathers, Old Filth, is very clean, and for much of the two novels isn’t old; it’s a Bar joke, an acronym, ‘failed in London try Hong Kong’. He begins his career as a QC specialising in construction law, then becomes a judge, spending most of his ...”

“... to that decade and a half that they unquestioningly accept it. It is an old chromatic cliché. Edward VI’s coat of arms is twice displayed in Sherborne, a small town in Dorset. One, very grand, is above a gateway. The second, smaller and framed by fluted ionic pilasters, is above a door in a courtyard; its heraldic beasts look doltishly rancorous. Both ...”

“... with women (‘Desdemona, before anything else, is A Woman’). There are also essays on Scott Fitzgerald, Twain, Emily Brontë, Stephen Crane, Traven’s The Death Ship, and of course Swift. It seems that no book concerned with the idea of the man of letters as man of action is nowadays complete without an essay or two on Swift: an honourable exemplar ...”

“... and lager louts, Essex Men and the Bright Young Things of Waugh and Huxley and Eliot and Scott Fitzgerald. The narrator describes the night of the flood, his glimpse of the entrance to the ark – ‘a dry risen corridor of light’ – and his own strange survival, borne out of the rain by a unicorn into a cottage full of animals – a cottage which ...”

“... a hundred she would puff out her lips and make a raspberry noise.’ Rubinstein’s husband Edward Titus, a great bibliophile and an expert on Baudelaire, very sensibly remained in Paris as his wife began her assault on New York. He had, she said later, ‘a nose for art, a nose for property’. However, ‘the cost of running him’, as Lindy Woodhead ...”

“... best left to newspapers: the role of the radio news bulletin was to encourage people to buy them. Edward Stourton recounts that one broadcast began: ‘Good evening, today is Good Friday. There is no news.’ By the mid-1930s, however, the BBC had set up a small news department as part of its burgeoning bureaucracy. It employed no reporters – news items ...”

“... and Althusser are as much at home in Jane Austen’s dressing-room as are Dostoevsky and Scott Fitzgerald. This may be all to the good, though it leads him to such remarks as that Elizabeth Bennet’s ‘gay resilience in a society tending always towards dull conformity would make her a worthy heroine in a Stendhal novel, which cannot be said for many ...”

“... Nicola Beauman and Francis King.) As such, it joins distinguished portraits of Novalis (Penelope Fitzgerald, The Blue Flower), Dostoevsky (Coetzee, The Master of Petersburg) and Henry James (Colm Tóibín, The Master), plus recentish likenesses of H.G. Wells, Byron, Woolf, Keats, Tolstoy, Conan Doyle, John Clare and others. Of these it has most in common ...”

“... modern warfare, Lindqvist’s book belongs on the same shelf as Way Out There in the Blue, Frances FitzGerald’s brilliant study of Star Wars and the ‘high narrative gloss’ that continues to attend its development. When the Strategic Defence Initiative was launched by Reagan in March 1983, it was a technologically impossible idea: ‘a science-fiction ...”

“... in the idea of life as a form of play and the writer as a kind of actor. At Cambridge, he and Edward Upward invented personae for themselves to inhabit, as well as a place, Mortmere, a sort of nursery habitation full of gothic fantasy, surreal antics and sexual innuendo. ‘Isherwood always found or invented someone or something to scrutinise and question ...”

“... of Edie Sedgwick. (She had published something of mine in Grand Street, and was a friend of Edward Said’s, whom I knew when I worked at the London Review.) On the day of the dinner she phoned to say that her cook had broken her arm so the dinner would be in a restaurant called Basta Pasta on 17th Street. I thought that sounded like the kind of place ...”

“... McCarthy and V.S. Pritchett and William Empson and V.S. Naipaul and Angela Carter and Penelope Fitzgerald. (McCarthy was the subject of another life lesson. He and she once, at a party, got into a conversation about the negative reviews of their own books. ‘Well,’ Karl said, ‘it’s not necessarily so bad as all that. You might not see the bad ...”

“... could not have been written without the formal breakthrough it represented. But Lermontov and Fitzgerald were equally, in certain respects perhaps more, important as inspirations. Powell was no one’s epigone. When he is set beside Proust, it is not the connections between them, but the disparities in reception that are most significant. The literature ...”

“... prevent, or make good, the consequences of bad loans and bankruptcy. As for the workforce, Robert Fitzgerald, in his account of the Rowntrees, points out that since ‘business and wealth were viewed by the Quakers as a God-given trust, labour could not be treated as a mere commodity’.In fact, some Quaker industrialists treated workers very badly, notably ...”