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“... I couldn’t get in touch with my feelings,’ Marlene Olive remarked one day after it was all over. ‘Lots of times I thought my dad was still alive.’ This must be deemed a serious failure of perception on her part, since with Chuck Riley, her teenage boyfriend and co-star in the true story of Bad Blood, Marlene murdered her parents in an act of astounding brutality ...”

“... with his wife Jackie not far behind: she was house-arrested for six years, banned for 19. To this day, Arenstein remains struck off the official list of attorneys – a punitive measure by the Government which has been in force for twenty years – and has to practise from modest offices disguised as a ‘business adviser and consultant’. Nonetheless, de ...”

“... was not a happy household, but it seemed stable enough despite Elsie’s fits of temper. Until one day, when he was 11, Archie came home from school and Mum wasn’t there. Had she gone away? Would she come back? The matter was suspended in doubt. Elias wondered aloud if she was dead. In fact, he had placed her in an asylum in the Bristol suburb of Fishponds ...”

“... hours from NY. Of course, it could be argued that the Aussies bring it on themselves, with their Barry McKenzies, their Ian Chappells, their self-parodying Foster ads, and so on. And there is the accent: for some reason more readily mimickable than any of our own regional twangs. Theories about the Australian accent are just as snooty as theories about ...”

“... Rosi’s Cristo si è fermato a Eboli, both otherwise deeply humane films. More and more present-day movies, in fact, contain scenes that are sickening to watch. We pay at the box-office knowing we’re in for an ordeal. It’s not the frisson of horror films, or the squalid but contained mayhem of Warner Brothers gangster epics: it’s violent cruelty, real ...”

“... the KGB in Cheltenham’, gets restive in his Cotswold retreat. ‘I had felt like Mole all that day,’ he says, innocently referring to The Wind in the Willows. Obviously there’s a powerful fantasy still at work here, a hangover from an earlier part of the century. These writers aren’t rejecting their ancestors; there’s no anxiety of influence, as ...”

“... very fond of me./But I love you still.’ Others laboured on projects that would see the light of day much later, Ernst Bloch’s Das Prinzip Hoffnung, written in the States, was published only in 1959. The classic work of the Frankfurt School, Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment, composed in Los Angeles during the war, became widely ...”

“... and bowling at the age of 13 – while at Durban High School the opening pair of Lee Irvine and Barry Richards had century or double-century partnerships every week; it was impossible to bowl to them. When in 1969-70 this lot, plus the young Pollock brothers, Peter and Graeme, slaughtered the Australians by four tests to nil, you felt that it had been ...”

“... accoucheur, free love enthusiast and original of Dickens’s Harold Skimpole. The other day he surprised me at second-hand. There he was, dark and mistrustful, eyeing me through a bookshop window. Benjamin Haydon’s touching and slightly impertinent young likeness (the original is in the National Portrait Gallery) graced a book called Fiery ...”

“... on your sepia-tinted goggles and investigate the legacy of slavery that still reverberates to this day, the legacy of Reconstruction that still reverberates to this day, and crackers. Invent nutty transliterations of what you think slaves talked like. But hurry up – the hounds are a-gittin’ closer! Sample ...”

“... Gordon will go quietly, however rough the going gets, is badly mistaken. 12 May. For the second day running the spotlight is on the Tories. Not for them sordid little claims for bath plugs or plasma TVs. No, they’ve been at it on an altogether different scale, with outrageous claims for housekeepers, repairs to tennis courts, swimming-pools; there’s ...”

“... Earlier this year, the Chinese president, Hu Jintao, went on a 12-day tour of Africa. In Zambia he announced that China would build an economic co-operation zone in the country that would attract $800 million of investment. Zambia’s former president, Kenneth Kaunda, received him personally, and the Chinese president delivered his usual speech: ‘China is happy to have Zambia as a good friend, good partner, and a good brother ...”

“... faculty for persuading others that the last thing he had said was what he had wanted all along. Dr Barry Smith, moreover, nailed this case down with a taut professionalism and an Antipodean lack of reverence which made any notion of unnailing it look distinctly fanciful. And so on. This is not the place for a full stock-check of the rich harvest of historical ...”

“... with the song of beautiful and vehement birds with names like Major Mitchell’s Cockatoo. When Barry Humphries squawked the other day that he had been pleased to find that Canberra had become a little ‘sleazy’, he was joking. Out of this garden city of good government, on 22 June 1983, flew a telex which ...”

“... 88 when its author died, and is 97 now. Still the books keep coming. This latest pair, by Barry Gewen and Thomas Schwartz, have moved beyond outrage to something more like bafflement, tinged with affection. Each begins with an effective admission of authorial uncertainty: why, they ask, am I writing about Henry Kissinger, when so much has been written ...”