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“... of his generation tracked across the Nottingham cobbles, as Cameron was tracked through Notting Hill, by an unseen camera car. The liberation of moving through a city independently, no clogged pavements, no bus queues, weaving around pedestrians, doing the banter, in English weather. Sleeves rolled, Finney turns out parts for Raleigh bicycles in the ...”

“... desert, sky, sun and, above all, the sea, the ‘call of life and an invitation to death’. As Susan Sontag wrote in a 1963 essay, he ‘is at his best when he disburdens himself of the baggage of existential culture … and speaks in his own person’. In Travels in the Americas, he does so with unusual intimacy.Camus made his first and only trip to the ...”

“... New Yorker,’ she wrote to her mother on 9 and 10 February. On the 11th, she wrote ‘Parliament Hill Fields’: ‘Your absence is inconspicuous;/Nobody can tell what I lack,’ the first stanza ends. The speaker’s winter walk home takes in a crocodile of small girls, a pink plastic barrette, a cloudbank, ‘I suppose it’s pointless to think of you at ...”

“... head at Churchill Gardens, Jane Thomas, retired at the end of the summer term in 2013; her deputy, Susan Rankin-Reid, took over, but soon left the school herself. In the Guardian Rajeev Syal reported that Rankin-Reid had been ‘bullied by academy managers’ and that ‘parents … blamed the academy for forcing her out’: the people I talked to who knew the ...”

“... Amato Ragazzo, edited by Rosella Mamoli Zorzi, and also in Letters to Younger Men, edited by Susan Gunter and Steven Jobe. The first letters by James to be published came in two volumes, overseen by the James family and edited by Percy Lubbock; they contained 403 letters and appeared in 1920, just four years after the novelist’s death. Lubbock found ...”

“... nightly in cinema queues? What, indeed? ‘Aren’t we going to be told who everyone is?’ said Susan, looking around the room and smiling. Effects like these have little in common with the ways of Swann or the beaches of Balbec; let alone celluloid derivatives. Lastly, and in many ways most significantly for reception at large, there is a difference of ...”

“... view is Tim Lang, who began his radical contemplation of food during the 1970s, when he worked a hill farm in Lancashire. He’s now professor of food policy at City University. It was Lang who showed me Woolton’s map, with its premonition of food miles, a concept he himself developed in the 1990s, and when we met, he took me back to the repeal of the Corn ...”

“... not feel it yet. Might not know it yet, except you did. ‘A new class of lifetime pariahs’, Susan Sontag called them in Aids and Its Metaphors: ‘the future ill’. The artist and film-maker Derek Jarman remembered his HIV diagnosis, in 1986: I thought: this is not true, then I realised the enormity. I had been pushed into yet another corner, this time ...”

“... were other children in the block with whom I played in the spaces of the flats. Helen, Jonathan, Susan, whose doors I knocked on, with whom I would have tea sometimes, who, occasionally, would have tea with me in my flat. So, I still dream about getting back to roam in the corridors, to climb the fire escape, to play the games and tell myself the stories I ...”

“... my name without making a patronising show of it, and stayed to tell a good story about Christopher Hill and John Sparrow, and of how he’d been the unwitting agent of a quarrel between them, while ignoring an ambitious and possessive American professor who kept yelling ‘Eye-zay-ah! Eye-zay-ah!’ from across the room. (‘Yes,’ he murmured at the ...”

“... of rain, or at the end of Lewis’s The Last Battle, with poor old Narnia dark and broken and Susan, with her disgusting lipstick and her nylons, shut out. Sex happens because it has to happen: there wouldn’t be much of a human race without it. And the existence of sex acts like a sentry – like Milton’s cherubim at the gates of Eden – preventing ...”