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“... rustic kind, but removed to the formality of a criminal courtroom he was an affront. What sort of man still needed to speak in that obscure and backward idiom halfway through the 20th century, in a country that prided itself on its vigilant and inclusive education system? The answer is just the sort of peasant patriarch, the Old ...”

“... which included a veiled attack on her father. She met Hemingway, Pound, Joyce, Ford Madox Ford, Man Ray, Brancusi. She and Thelma slotted in neatly with the American expats Stein called the ‘Lost Generation’. Thelma was lost and losing it more and more. Her life with Barnes (or Robin Vote’s life with Nora Flood), as described in ...”

“... the new novel’s protagonist is less interested in social justice than in his own expedience. Ray Carney owns a furniture store on 125th Street in Harlem, has a college degree and, at the age of 29, aspires more than anything to move his family to a better neighbourhood. It’s a slippery climb up into the higher echelons of Harlem’s business elite, not ...”

“... be dissected with dignity. The ancestors of the figures in modern textbooks and encyclopedias, the man and woman in Vesalius’s De Humani Corporis Fabrica, manage it by gesturing eloquently as they are unpacked tripe by tripe. Their classical attitudes clearly label them as art. Francis Bacon turned his back on art when he used a book about positioning ...”

“... and she wanted to know why it was dry. I was miles away. I said I didn’t know. Aeroplane Glue Mr Ray stood behind me in History, waiting for me to make a slip. I had to write out the Kings and Queens of England, in reverse order, with dates. I put, ‘William I, 1087-1066’. I could smell the aeroplane glue on his fingers as he took hold of my ear. I stood ...”

“... achievements of classical civilisation than those of modern physics. Bertrand Russell, a Cambridge man and a mathematician who disparaged the effects of a classical education, could enthusiastically campaign for ‘scientific method in philosophy’, and Rudolf Carnap, writing in a self-consciously Russellian vein, claim that ‘the new type of philosophy has ...”

“... of life itself. In Rome, Ed Coleman makes an unsuccessful attempt to murder his son-in-law, Ray Garrett, a failed painter and gallery-owner in his late twenties, whom he blames for the recent suicide of his only child, Peggy, Ray’s wife. Rather than flee, Ray follows Ed to ...”

“... can a novelist compete with HBO? A television show can spend a hundred hours on the study of one man, his family, his colleagues, his psychiatrist, with space for digression and nuance: ‘The Sopranos isn’t Shakespeare, but it is Balzac,’ said Leon Wieseltier. Box sets of DVDs ape the look of a book with their pages of discs, and are designed to fit on ...”

“... few months after seeing Viridiana for the first time, I was in Spain, and met a charming man, a doctor, who claimed to know Buñuel intimately, and to have helped him recruit the beggars for that film. I can’t remember whether I believed him or not. Probably I did. Buñuel for me was as distant as Cervantes or Saint Teresa, and I didn’t even know ...”

“... agency – I now suspect my silences contain the best of me.          And I’m a man who likes talking          to a man who likes to talk.          I never said that, Sidney Greenstreet said it. And even now a form of words can surely be found for my feelings when, packing up to move on ...”

“... textual interpretation. Particularly irksome is the claim of conceptual rhetoricians like Paul de Man that philosophy has not yet caught up with ‘elementary refinements’ that criticism has long since taken for granted. Deconstruction goes furthest towards contesting the status of philosophy by showing how its concepts finally come down to the ...”

“... via a gate set in the cemetery wall to the Mary Rankin Wing of St Pancras Hospital. As a young man, Thomas Hardy supervised the removal of bodies from part of the cemetery to make way for the trains. He placed the headstones round an ash tree sapling, now grown tall, where I stop sometimes to look at the stones crowding round the old tree like children ...”

“... According to Gordon Ray, writing in 1956, all that posterity could reasonably expect to know about the elusive Wilkie Collins was his name and dates of birth and death. This has proved to be an exaggeration. Thanks to Kenneth Robinson (whose revised Wilkie Collins, A Biography came out in 1974) and now, preeminently, to William Clarke, we now know much more – especially about Collins’s family affairs, or scandals, as they would have seemed to his contemporaries ...”

“... real models, each a slightly different concept, reverberate in the mind like one of Charles and Ray Eames’s own designs. Husband and wife, the Eameses were architects and furniture designers, notably of the plywood and leather armchair and ottoman that has become a classic if not a cliché of the modernist interior and the ubiquitous moulded plastic ...”

“... can’t bear to listen to the songs considered their most characteristic (‘Heroin’, ‘Sister Ray’). With a decidedly slim catalogue (four studio albums) but an outsized posthumous reputation, they are not an easy act to place in the history of popular music. Nor is it easy to identify the band as a unit, since members came and went. ‘The Velvet ...”