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“... are too high, supermarket prices too low; TV steals readers, except when it doesn’t (thank Richard and Judy). Nobody buys books. In fact, they do: the annual turnover of the British publishing industry is now £2.8 billion – a little more than fish or cheese and a little less than bread. That’s right, bread. The UK bread market is worth £2.9 ...”

“... hangers-on, ‘terrorists’ and the occasional gangster. Several of Campbell’s principals – Richard Wright, Samuel Beckett, Jérôme Lindon, Maurice Girodias – also turn up in Lennon’s story, like Balzac’s recurring characters or, less charitably, like figures in some bizarre soap opera. Naturally, the principal locale is the café or the ...”

“... The greatest story since the Resurrection was how Mencken described the 1935 trial of Bruno Richard Hauptmann for the kidnapping and murder of the Lindbergh baby. Among the three hundred-odd reporters present, besides Mencken, were Damon Runyon, Ford Madox Ford, Edna Ferber, Alexander Woollcott, Heywood Broun, Walter Winchell and Joseph Alsop, who was required to write no less than ten thousand words a day for the Herald Tribune ...”

“... merely of order, but of an expressive energy which makes order and freedom itself worth having? Richard Sennett believes that it is. As he has explained in what he has written about Chicago and about the bewildered self-contempt of blue-collar workers in Boston in the late 1960s, and as he has most elaborately argued in The Fall of Public Man, Sennett ...”

“... in attainments, would be T.E. Lawrence, Robert Graves, Peter Fleming (perhaps both Flemings) and Richard Hughes. It makes no difference that Lawrence was half-Irish, the Flemings mostly Scottish, and Hughes partly Welsh. The presidential or father figure of the group would be John Buchan, another Scot, whose innings was over before the younger ones started ...”

“... while his sometime girlfriend Patti Smith hollered ‘Go Rimbaud, go Rimbaud!’ and his pal Richard Hell traded Huysmans lines with Lester Bangs. One of the founding members of the anarchist outfit Crass changed his name by deed poll in 1977 to Penny Rimbaud. Here were the Fall, and the Cure’s ‘Killing an Arab’. Nurse with Wound quoted ...”

“... like ‘What is Language?’ seriously enough to think that Derrida is going to give you some nice new answers to them. Do not read this book in search of contributions to an understanding of the nature of signs, or metaphors, or anything else. Avoid letting Derrida use you as a straight person. Do not let the weak and question-begging character of his ...”

“... than the other proposed reforms). Mussolini announced his intention of making Italians ‘less nice’ and more ‘odious, tough and implacable: in other words, masters’. In April 1937, he made it illegal for white Italians to have sexual relations with blacks, a measure prompted by the mass sexual exploitation of Ethiopian women by Italian troops ...”

“... patrilineal descent is an excuse for Anne Clifford to defy her two husbands and her sovereign (a nice irony, too briefly discussed by Lewalski). Lewalski conscientiously tries to describe what these women believed, but since her unifying motif is simply subversion, the details of their thought keep fading into superficial mystifications. Religious ...”

“... After many vicissitudes the Library of America was launched, under the direction of Daniel Aaron, Richard Poirier and Jason Epstein, who had worked with Wilson on the original abortive project. These people and their associates raised $600,000 from the Ford Foundation and then $1.2 million from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Then they went to work ...”

“... not so much politicians as sublime social columnists who happened to sit in the House of Commons. Richard Crossman and Barbara Castle were heavyweights and professionals, and the eternal grind of committee life is reflected in their accounts. Yet both were writing with the special excitement of socialist voyeurs. Determined to expose the secrets of Whitehall ...”

“... to her younger self; criticises the script and forgets her lines. Everyone is obscenely nice to her and she doesn’t care. Finally, she turns up on opening night paralytically drunk and goes bonkers on stage. Her moment of clarity arrives when she sees her arrogant co-star, and former partner, preparing for their closing scene, an explosive ...”

“... more or less successful rules for guiding action to fulfil one or another want. For him, the nice thing about Darwin was not that he got human beings right, but that he made available a way of describing human beings which enabled us to discard a lot of unfruitful questions which had been posed by other ways of describing them. The ...”

“... self-containment. In 1935 Barbara Pym had written in her diary: ‘I often think Henry is never so nice as when he’s standing at the door of his flat saying good-bye.’ ‘Saying good-bye’ is of course in itself a pure and classic Romantic experience (in Keats it is Joy himself who has his hand ever at his lips). The individual quality of Barbara Pym’s ...”

“... One can find,’ wrote Stanley Spencer, ‘interesting and very nice things in dustbins and incinerators.’ Ferreting about among rubbish heaps struck him as ‘a distinctly entertaining and elevating pastime’ and the beads, scraps of china and old books he disinterred ‘really satisfied my highest thoughts ...”