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“... inherited a taste for drink and drama, a touch of Scottish diablerie with literary affiliations in James Hogg, and in such a novel as George Douglas’s The House with the Green Shutters. These are certainly present in the more sensational side of his work. But Twenty Thousand Streets has a quite different and much more English atmosphere, finding its models ...”

“... and educated as a doctor, his son William turns up at Guy’s Hospital playing hand to the mind of James Hinton – a surgeon in whose philosophy the Ripper’s role as ‘time’s abortionist’ is first outlined. White Chappell is preoccupied by the Ripper murders, but Sinclair is not seeking to trace out the true identity of the Ripper: a question still ...”

“... begin his 1980 Presidential campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi, where the civil rights workers James Chaney, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman were murdered in 1964. The American Century details J. Edgar Hoover’s personal and the FBI’s institutional linking of white supremacist and anti-Communist hysterias, to which America’s national police ...”

“... worked for Marilyn, by her housekeeper Eunice Murray, her cleaner Lena Pepit-one, by a fan called James Haspiel who used to stand outside her apartment, by one or two guys who slept with her, by any numbers of guys who wanted to sleep with her, and by a tittle-tattle lifeguard at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. Her half-sister Bernice Miracle wrote a ...”

“... Garden’ she is imitating Villette, in ‘Mark Stafford’s Wife’ she is imitating Henry James, in ‘The Wheat’ she is imitating May Sinclair and in ‘The Fatal Fidelity’ she seems to be having a shot at W.W. Jacobs. Her first story, ‘Passed’, is the most impulsive and interesting of the lot. The subject is guilt. A respectable young woman ...”

“... absolute freedom. Hemingway must have seen himself as rather like the writers about whom Henry James liked to expand, men who recognised marriage as fatal to art but who couldn’t always manage without it. There is just a touch of updated Yellow Book about Hemingway’s marital history. He even turned against men friends when he thought the relationship ...”

“... briefly before being swallowed by a moving plot.Poem-novels, or poem-stories, are all about us – James Fenton’s ‘A German Requiem’, Anne Stevenson’s ‘Correspondences’, Blake Morrison’s ‘The Inquisitor’, Motion’s ‘Independence’, the plotty, tessellated pattern of the poems in Carol Rumens’s Direct Dialling, with its East-West love ...”

“... was an undergraduate, of a scholarly edition of John Locke’s Two Treatises of Government by Peter Laslett. Laslett showed how radically Locke’s text had been misunderstood because of the ignorance of political scientists about, and their indifference to, the circumstances and aims of its composition. Locke’s second Treatise, it emerged, was written ...”

“... as he was always known – was born, the family lived in a grand house near Chalfont St Peter. But Charles wasn’t a successful doctor; his ambitions seem to have been more as an inventor. At one point he tried to interest the Post Office in a phone box that locked you in if you rang the emergency services (this was meant to deter hoax ...”

“... I didn’t like to read ’em, particularly.’ Of his high-school contemporaries – who included James Baldwin, Paddy Chayefsky, Richard Avedon and Sugar Ray Robinson – the only one to make an impression on him was a classmate who used an easy flow of patter to sell his fellow students subscriptions to the New York Times.At seventeen he found a job at ...”

“... and developmental, which Rose takes in The 21st-Century Brain. I recall a lovely book by James Thurber and E.B. White, Is Sex Necessary?, among other things a spoof on sex manuals. In their day (1929) these handbooks had a lot of drawings of genital organs, with parts labelled, that made no sense at all. Thurber and White proposed these should be ...”

“... the oddness of some of the president’s other appointments and his treatment of them. General James Jones, whom Obama had never met, was asked to become national security adviser. Once chosen, he hardly ever saw the president alone. To head the CIA Obama picked Leon Panetta, a former congressman who had served as Bill Clinton’s chief of staff. Panetta ...”

“... liberties’ (Blackstone) and ‘the great palladium of the liberties of the subject’ (Charles James Fox). Technically known as the writ of habeas corpus ad subjiciendum et recipiendum, it was one of a family of writs containing the words ‘habeas corpus’. Other forms (less long-lived and much less well known) required the body of a person already in ...”

“... officials to be arrested were Richard Trunkfield, a prison officer who had sold details about James Bulger’s killer Jon Venables; Alan Tierney, a Surrey police constable who was paid £1250 for passing information that John Terry’s mother had been cautioned for shoplifting, and Ronnie Wood for assaulting his girlfriend; and Tracy Bell, a pharmacy ...”

“... took the role of Someone and eight years later, after an extended gestation about the length of James Joyce’s for Ulysses, Heller published the novel which set the standard he chased for the rest of his life. To the bold query why he never published another book as good as Catch-22, he would answer, ‘Who has?’ But at the same time Heller believed that ...”