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“... doubt that William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon is the author of the works published in his name: not Sir Francis Bacon, or Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford, or Christopher Marlowe, living on in secret after his apparent death in a brawl in 1593 (before most of Shakespeare’s works were written), or one of the more than 50 alternative candidates who have ...”

“... people seem willing to suspend their general disapproval, disappointment, boredom, nausea – you name it – in the case of our Sovereign Lady the Queen. Unselfish, dutiful, serious, modest, faithful unto death, she rises above the showbiz values, disco ambitions and petty neuroses of her clan and brood. But does she truly deserve such a ...”

“... Starbuck eventually loses his job and all his friends as a result. In 1970, Nixon remembers his name and gives him a minor job on the staff. The Watergate conspirators hide a trunk with $1 million of bribes inside it in his basement office. He is sent to jail. Two weeks before his arrest, Ruth dies. He leaves jail destitute and friendless. The next day, on ...”

“... death in the Nevada gambling city. The screenplay was adapted by Figgis from a novel of the same name by John O’Brien (who himself committed suicide shortly after Figgis had acquired the rights to film his book). Figgis signals his awareness of Hollywood’s current sweep-it-under-the-carpet attitude to alcohol in the deftly judged opening scene. Looking ...”

“... Noel and Damon, who have, well, given the nod already, it’s no less partisan in practice than Billy Bragg’s Red Wedge. Rodol’s Use Your Vote campaign doesn’t feign impartiality. His postcards are distributed throughout the country’s pubs and clubs; they depict bigots (‘Thank God for Aids’), racists (‘Piss on Niggers’) and smug ...”

“... and her virtue for her country. Lucy lives to marry spy-catcher Fred Bloggs, who is everything his name suggests him to be. Triple is set in 1967-68. One man, an Arab aristocrat, ruthless, brilliant, irresistible to women, schemes to hijack a delivery of uranium. With the uranium Egypt will atom-bomb a defenceless Israel. Only one man can track down Hassan ...”

“... overnight and messages of support started to come in from people like Tariq Ali, Noam Chomsky and Billy Bragg; comedians came to tell jokes, bands to play, novelists to read their books, tutors to give seminars. On 29 November, the day before the third march, they sent a delegation to protest outside the Oxford Circus Topshop about Philip Green’s alleged ...”

“... lyrics by Shel Silverstein, is more joke than song, about a man who gives his son a girl’s name, because he thinks it’ll toughen him up. When Cash sings it live, on At San Quentin, you can hear the prison inmates go wild; goodness only knows what they’d have done had he decided to perform his version of the excruciatingly sentimental barbershop ...”

“... Darryl Zanuck had declared a few years before. ‘No producer who is worthy of the name will reject entertainment, and without entertainment no propaganda film is worth a dime.’ This was the time of the pro-Soviet political memoir Mission to Moscow by the American ambassador Joseph E. Davies. It quickly became a film dedicated to the good of ...”

“... and work since Henry Salt’s in 1889. Thomson’s poem The City of Dreadful Night is known by name to many but has seldom been reprinted or discussed. Histories of literature say more about an earlier James Thomson (1700-48) who wrote The Seasons and ‘Rule Britannia’ and got into Johnson’s Lives of the Poets, though Johnson says his diction was ...”

“... It’s difficult even to know what to call her. The band leader Barney Rapp came up with the name Day, after Doris’s rendition of ‘Day after Day’. It was 1939 and she was 17, just starting out, in her first spot as the singer for a band, before going on to work with Bob Crosby (Bing’s brother) and then with Les Brown and His Band of Renown. She ...”

“... of the exclamation-mark which gives a stirring emphasis to the Victorian adventure story (and the name of the Victorian school), Worstward Ho is the signal for an implosion of fictional matter. ‘I can’t go on, I’ll go on’ is perhaps the most memorable of Beckett’s phrases, conveying as it does the force of contradiction as an agent in thickening and ...”

“... to his former wife, his ‘dearest’, his ‘most beloved’, his ‘precious Julie’ (her real name was Lucie), were later published and are here translated. In the printed version all references to his mercenary purpose were deleted, although in his first year away he was forever attending balls, soirées, routs, race meetings and country house parties at ...”

“... exercised and the ground is so springy.’ She even turned out to have met a dog of Una’s called Billy; one section of their report, ‘The Billy Incident’, consists of their attempts to find out whether the dead dog had indeed suffered from the ailments ascribed to him by Ladye’s spirit. Hall and Troubridge also hired ...”

“... with the danger of another fall and another break. The Poet (it’s so good to call him by the name I gave him when nothing was wrong) has to help me dress and go up or down the stairs. It’s about as tough on him as it is on me. I was fully of the opinion when the cancer diagnosis was first made that he had the worst of it, but since trying to haul ...”