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“... for – not least because the post-apocalyptic world may yet seem to them more all-American, more John Wayne, than the current state of the nation. The zombie genre immerses you in a world of unending threat, where the only human contact is collaboration without closeness, where random cruelty is the rule, and life closes down on you as an experience not only ...”

“... of winter’; I could have lived happily in a world of perpetual cold. So when I began reading John Evelyn’s diary entries for January and February 1684, I should have been delighted. Instead, I felt an odd revulsion: 9 January: I went across the Thames on the ice, now become so thick as to bear not only streets of booths, in which they roasted ...”

“... or hard to resist. Later in this book, Hughes cannot resist relating how Frank Packer (‘the gross and meat-fisted capitalist who owned Australian Consolidated Press’) calmed the anxieties of a new secretary he’d seduced by offering her a black aniseed jelly bean as an oral contraceptive, even though he admits that ‘of course nobody had any means ...”

“... branch of knowledge, deriving at one or two removes from Alfred Jarry’s stage inflatable, the gross Père Ubu, of which one nebulous definition among several is ‘the science that lies as far beyond metaphysics as metaphysics lies beyond physics – in one direction or another’. The Collège, it appears, went into voluntary ‘occultation’ in the ...”

“... in the 20th century is that their potential readership seems obstinately unaffected by either gross population growth or the extension of higher education. The quarterlies’ circulation in the pre-Victorian period peaked around fifteen thousand. Blackwood’s in the 1840s sold around ten thousand, Punch a couple of thousand less. The Athenaeum at its ...”

“... Of those that remain, Joshua Reynolds, the Shakespearian scholar Malone and the politician John Courtenay are affectionate and supportive. These were the years, as we occasionally have to remind ourselves, when his Life of Johnson was completed, put to press, published, relished and extolled. This does less for him than might have been ...”

“... Lord Northcliffe and the editor of Tit-Bits at its head. There had rapidly come into being what John Carey describes as ‘an alternative culture which bypassed the intellectual and made him redundant’. It was a culture that used itself up as it went along, but its audience could be numbered in millions and the delights it provided were not all that easy ...”

“... the reader by a sadistic desire to shock at all costs; in place of the short story, there is the gross and overblown novel which strains its every sinew to the state of commercial apotheosis which is awaiting it upon the cinema screen. Susan Hill’s The Woman in Black and William Peter Blatty’s Legion (‘The sequel to The Exorcist’) very neatly ...”

“... financial interests and maintaining Nazi Germany as a bulwark against Soviet communism. It was a gross caricature, but with just enough basis in fact to lend it plausibility. The play’s impact had much to do with timing. The Israeli kidnapping, trial and execution of Adolf Eichmann had intensified public interest in the Holocaust. Within the Catholic ...”

“... Quennell – and he seems to enjoy being generous to other reviewers, as when he justly praises John Updike. He is full of gratitude to literary editors, commemorating Ian Hamilton’s work on the New Review in terms only this side of idolatry. Such writers and editors do the work he wants to help with – they keep going some intelligent conversation about ...”

“... itself is a scandal. Their disapproval of the honours system must be taken for granted. John Walker is presumably more open-minded, and willing to speak as he finds, though what exactly an enquirer finds must depend on his general perspectives. ‘This book started,’ we are told, ‘as an article for Labour Research.’ Walker spent five years in ...”

“... This history of the Tower Menagerie, founded 1235, begins on a winter day in 1764, when John Wesley, aged 61, arrived at the Tower with a flute-playing companion, to conduct what he called ‘an odd experiment’. The idea was to observe how the lions reacted to music, which might give some indication as to whether animals possessed souls. Descartes ...”

“... young in 1985. Robin Birkenhead’s draft extended to the end of 1940. It had been shown to Sir John Colville, who was asked to finish the story. He declined, but wrote an epilogue giving his own view of the Churchill he had known. He died suddenly in October 1987, having just completed the Foreword to the book now published. Robin Birkenhead had never ...”

“... to a denunciation of the Western media for the exaggerations they were peddling; and some were gross: a famous UPI report had the streets of Kiev filled with panic-stricken radioactive refugees. Arguably, the absence of panic was a benign side-effect of official mendacity. Gorbachev assumed, or claimed, that the Western media reaction was black ...”

“... stood by Oscar, but he was not deceived about him. He saw that success had made him arrogant: ‘gross not in body only – he did become that – but in his relations with people. He brushed people aside’ – and his later comments on Wilde are tolerant but penetrating. Wilde wrote that ‘absolute humility’ was the one thing left for him, and Max ...”