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“... with the star (called ‘Jean Shaw’ and a compound of Veronica Lake, Bette Davis and Loretta Young) revives dangerous nostalgia for Hollywood’s clear-cut moralities:   ‘And I remember – I don’t know if it was that picture or another one – you shot the bad guy. He looks at the blood on his hand, looks down at his shirt. He still can’t ...”

“... Haggard’s book ‘a good deal higher than Treasure Island’.The story follows the narrator Allan Quatermain – an elephant hunter with good manners – and his colleagues, Sir Henry Curtis and Captain Good, on a journey into Mashukulumbwe country. Quatermain early on stakes his claim to heroic status when he says that he has already killed, but always ...”

“... 1985, of his selected writings, Visions of Excess (edited with an excellent introductory essay by Allan Stoekl), almost none of Bataille’s work was available in English translation. Over the past few years, new translations (as well as reissues of a few old ones, such as Story of the Eye and Death and Sensuality) have come fast and furious. By yet another ...”

“... Daniell wrote a pamphlet on The New Trade Unionism with a handsome Scottish radical called Robert Allan Nicol (a ‘Shelleyan type’), which, rather than discussing pickets, looked forward to ‘the union of the Souls of Mankind in a perfect Love’. Daniell had met Nicol when she was still married, during a trip to Edinburgh for medical treatment in ...”

“... to her, though she needs to move away from them if she is to defend them. Ben, the baby, is too young to feel a sense of emergency, but Viv, at three, is old enough both to co-operate and to do the opposite of what she’s told. Even when she follows instructions, success isn’t guaranteed. Asked to bring the bat from the closet – Molly means the ...”

“... spare five dollars?’) is the familiar disarming overture to vicious subway muggings. A couple of young blacks do indeed approach the stopped Sherman with a deceptively friendly ‘Yo! Need some help?’ and an omnious walk which Wolfe terms ‘the pimp roll’. Sherman feels as generations of blacks must have done when confronted with the white-sheeted lynch ...”

“... façade of Lucy’s Edwardian middle-class life? What are they? What are they really? They are a young woman and a young man in Italy for goodness sake, and doesn’t death make that gloriously apparent?One could, at least at first, mistake Checkout 19 for a story of coming-of-age via literature, a genre so often done ...”

“... make considered judgments and to do the right thing. His childhood imagination was fired by Edgar Allan Poe, Jules Verne, W.W. Jacobs’s story ‘The Monkey’s Paw’ – and there’s still a well-behaved French schoolboy inside him who delights in weird tales of human oddity, pirate ships, revenants and Captain Nemo. In a constellation of freakish ...”

“... the keepers takes place only at the end of the book, and when Mr Ramsay springs ‘lightly like a young man’ out of the boat and onto the rock, he disappears from the narrative.As an enigmatic symbol, the lighthouse has long held an imaginative appeal. The Pharos at Alexandria was remarkable among secular buildings, E.M. Forster wrote, in having ‘taken on ...”

“... detox and drug rehabilitation projects. The London Connection, in Westminster, tries to attract young people between 16 and 26; it has television, a pool table, provides free razors and lunch at 15 pence. The Kaleidoscope Project, in Kingston upon Thames, aims to serve heroin-users in need of treatment. They house a medical team who run a methadone ...”

“... German authors who are a little in love with the English, more particularly a certain kind of young Englishman of the upper classes, with his good temper and considerateness, his easy good manners and what Thomas Mann called his ‘boyhaft’ good looks. This affection, rarely reciprocated by English authors, goes back at least to the time of Herder and ...”

“... fingers had swollen – she was six months pregnant. This wasn’t merely torture, the activist Allan Boesak recalled, but a ‘demonstration’. The attackers – it is believed – were from the Security Police, specifically the notorious ‘Hammer Unit’, whose members used their own personal weapons and would drive into the townships ‘dressed as ...”

“... it becomes unreal, impossible wouldn’t you say?’ he suggests in a letter to Alec France, a young graduate student who began a dissertation on Bowles’s fiction in the early Seventies, but, a note informs us, committed suicide midway through his research. The compulsion to prove existence ‘impossible’ seems to lie at the heart of Bowles’s ...”

“... own literary biography. For this was a man of secretive bent who had served his time when young among the Surrealists, but had then broken with them, rancorously, as was the tradition among André Breton’s quarrelsome flock. It was a wonder that Queneau had ever wanted to be part of it because his inclinations had always urged him towards the safely ...”

“... 1952, at a meeting of the Shaw Society, he publicly relinquished work on the bibliography – and young Dan Laurence, then a college graduate assistant, stood up and announced that he would undertake the job. Thirty-one years and 15 days later it was published. Mr Laurence has been sustained over these decades, he tells us, by ‘angry determination’. What ...”