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“... superficiality, his book achieves real depth. China first appears in his pages as an emotional black hole. The author’s Chinese friends tell him, for example, that ‘envy, or rather the fear of envy ... is poisoning China.’ And that ‘the deterioration lies everywhere – in the culture, in the people who carry that culture.’ ‘The crux’ is how ...”

“... Professor Vendler’s soul is in peril. Reviewing Black American broadsides in 1974, she found it ‘sinful that anthologies and Collected Works should betray the poems they print by jamming them together and running them into one another.’ Yet here is her Faber Book, a self-confessed anthology which, attempting to present 35 poets ‘whole’, aspires to be a collection of Collecteds ...”

“... 4 per cent of the population. In statistical terms it was the greatest natural disaster since the Black Death, yet the Great Influenza Epidemic (or Pandemic) of 1918-19 has vanished from public consciousness. Unlike the war that immediately preceded it, the flu has left scarcely a trace in modern literature; historical accounts of it are sparse; one of its ...”

“... Online vaunted its association with two local celebrities: ‘Some Mothers Do ’Ave ’Em star Michael Crawford revealed he visited the pub during filming forty years ago. And German literary star Uwe Johnson also had his own stool at the pub where he used to write about the people he met.’ Photos of Crawford and Johnson accompanied a picture of the ...”

“... definitive change for the Slomnicki family as their ship headed into the pitching, slanting, very black Black Sea. They stopped speaking German to one another. Whether by agreement or instinct, they changed, overnight, the language in which they had all lived together. Elena was now Helen, Mummy not Mami; Papa became Daddy; the boys were still Donald and ...”

“... City, inscribed for Carolyn by way of apology, after a bad boy’s night, a stand-up row with a black girl, sulks in the attic. Here was that book, as well as a copy of On the Road that showed clear evidence of having been thoroughly invigilated, and bearing, at the head of the fixed endpaper, Neal Cassady’s neat signature. Verification that any reputable ...”

“... smile to herself and sit back again.’ When George’s daughter Anne was born in 1919 and son Michael in 1921, the sisters became enthusiastic babysitters and general chroniclers of their brother’s household. ‘I think George enjoys the thrill she gets when she gives her name in shops,’ Lolly wrote. ‘Mrs W.B. Yeats.’ Lily thought her ...”

“... Day at Honda’ has an explicitly able-bodied protagonist, while Spencer Tracy in Bad Day at Black Rock (1955) is famously one-armed. All Norden can think of to say is that Tracy’s character is ‘“remasculated” through his heroic deeds’. Since when was he demasculated? He looks pretty tough from the word go (even Norden describes him as ‘a ...”

“... males. These could be the men of her own party, as when she notes how hopeless Geoffrey Howe and Michael Heseltine were when they accompanied her on a visit to Reagan in 1985. ‘I did not bring them again,’ she remarks, for all the world as though they were a couple of incontinent pet dogs. But foreign statesmen could fare little better. That same ...”

“... crew), and during rehearsals is beaten up and raped by a monstrously endowed Madagascan convict, Black Caesar. All these are problems. But the chief obstacle to Mary’s cohabiting with Clark is modesty. She has tattooed on her backside the message, ‘Andrew Hilton I love thee to the grave’, Hilton being her former London fence. This embarrassment is ...”

“... their father at weekends in happier days singing “Onward Christian Soldiers”, “Baa Baa Black Sheep” and “John Brown’s body lies a mould’ring in the grave” – there were now ominous pools of blood.’ And she will grasp at anything to try and make things look better for John. The Coroner had asked: ‘Would an instinctive ...”

“... they brought it out of the pit where it had cooked all day. The pig had been on a stick, sagging black, falling apart. Under Annie’s sharp regime, Sheldon actually contrives to produce in ‘Misery’s Return’ what he recognises as the best instalment of the saga. Nurse, it would seem, knows best. In the inevitably gory climax Sheldon turns the ...”

“... Hubert Bland was very big and very vain. The son of a Woolwich clerk, he sported a top hat, a black-ribboned monocle, and an aggressively argumentative manner. When his wife wanted to make sure he saw a message she would prop it in the frame of a looking-glass (Julia Briggs deposits this information in a footnote, as she does other sprightly ...”

“... significantly from the temporary release of the Balcombe Street IRA gang and the Loyalist killer Michael Stone. I remember die Kipling story, ‘The Village that Voted the Earth Was Flat’. I fear the flat-earthers and can’t be sure. Outside the headquarters of the Ulster Democratic Party (associated with the UDA) – a narrow converted shop on the ...”

“... The main vehicle for all of this was the Congress for Cultural Freedom, ‘run by CIA agent Michael Josselson from 1950 till 1967’. My first encounter (pun unintended) with the Congress was through The God that Failed, a compendium of confessions by well-known former Communists (and/or sympathisers) that included Gide, Silone and Koestler; it was ...”