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“... Israeli telephone company, Bezeq, are hanging a cable from metal brackets screwed into the ancient wall. In front of me is a narrow arched doorway; above it, dozens of tattered black-and-white photographs of a teenage boy have been stuck to the slabs of stone. A middle-aged man with a trim moustache and very short hair calls out to me from the other side of ...”

“... and whiskers with sad, rheumy eyes – Matthew Arnold, Carlyle, Swinburne, William Morris, Leslie Stephen, Tennyson – giving off a steamy despair. They had heard the melancholy long withdrawing roar of faith, and they did not like the sound of it. Today relegated to a wall in a side room, these literary men seem to take ...”

“... Stephen King has occasionally raised a rueful protest against being typed as a horror writer – even with the consolation of being the best-selling horror writer in the history of the world. But, as he disarmingly reminds us, there is worse literary company than Lovecraft, Leiber, Bloch, Matheson and Jackson. ‘I could, for example, be an “important” writer like Joseph Heller and publish a novel every seven years or so, or a “brilliant” writer like John Gardner and write obscure books for bright academics who eat macrobiotic foods and drive old Saabs with faded but still legible GENE McCARTHY FOR PRESIDENT stickers on the rear bumpers ...”

“... have never been given sex quite like this before). Roughly halfway​ through The Lesser Bohemians Stephen tells his story to Eily (it takes seventy pages). It is his confession – although the content could not be more different, the allusion to Stavrogin’s confession prepared the ground. Since they are named for the first time after he has done so, the ...”

“... plays ‘Rock around the clock’, and then ‘Heartbreak Hotel’. This is Berlin before the Wall, torn by memories, littered with ruins, and even more littered with spies, ‘between five and ten thousand’, if a report quoted in the novel is to be believed. George Blake, sentenced in 1961 to 42 years in prison for spying, makes a few brief appearances ...”

“... have tried to, but it was not until I was 16 and a bit late in the day. Another boy had shown me Stephen Spender’s World Within World, or at any rate the bits dealing with homosexuality, the references to which (while pretty opaque by today’s standards) were thought rather daring in 1951. Spender had been befriended by the music master, Mr Greatorex, who ...”

“... Both contemptuously reject the view, which seemed supreme after the collapse of the Berlin Wall and what used to be known (quite wrongly) as Communism, that the world is now set fair on a course to libertarian capitalist prosperity. Instead of the torch of freedom, Klein writes, ‘it seems that it may be the torch of authoritarianism that is being ...”

“... Grain Market and Confraternity (Brill, £150), Marie D’Aguanno Ito compares the market to Wall Street. It had many features of the pre-electronic exchange model, with its standardised measures and pricing, set hours and regulatory oversight, and the beginning and end of trading each day was even marked by the ringing of a bell. But the New York Stock ...”

“... The Red Badge of Courage​ is generally the only thing about Stephen Crane that readers remember now. The novel, first published in 1895 when Crane was only 23, is short and centres on the battlefield experience of a man younger still, Henry Fleming, who worries that in the test of war he will prove a coward, and then does ...”

“... works, Ulysses revolves on a botched revelation or bungled epiphany, as Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus finally meet to no momentous effect. Nothingness is a traditional topic of Irish writing, all the way from the negative theology of the great medieval schoolman John Scottus Eriugena to the vision of hell of Flann O’Brien’s The Third ...”

“... than a man, subsisted on boiled eggs, cooked 50 at a time while he was boiling his glue, studied a wall on which sick persons had used to spit, imagining that he saw there fantastic cities and combats of horses. Moreover he would never suffer his fruit trees to be pruned or trained, and so on. Vasari improves the story by arguing that there was method in ...”

“... the ghost of Christmas past’ – but now in December 1977 the Enfield ghost shouts through the wall: ‘I come from Durants Park, I am 72 years old ... Shut the fucking door ... I want some jazz music, now go and get me some, else I’ll go barmy.’ In the old days spiritual graffiti-writing was an art – ‘Mene, mene, tekel, upharsin’ written in ...”

“... newsworthy events. A rogue Japanese trader had out-Leesoned Leeson by losing a billion dollars on Wall Street without his employers noticing; Clinton had successfully, as it seemed, bombed the Serbs and blackmailed the Israelis to the peace table; Humphrey the missing Downing Street cat had been found. What the Times chose to lead with on Wednesday morning ...”

“... limit to what she can achieve’ as a writer, is more debatable. Born in 1882, the young Virginia Stephen grew up in a society in which service, either giving or receiving it, was the defining relationship of domestic life, particularly for women. By 1850, Light tells us, 80 per cent of servants were female and they were mostly answerable to the mistress of ...”

“... however, has results unpredictable by anyone. Think of the guidance given to a falling marble by a wall bristling with pegs: the slightest change in how you drop the marble makes it bounce down a different sequence of pegs, ending in a different spot. In developing this theme, Bohm and Hiley introduced a highly unpopular element: the effect of the pilot waves ...”