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“... book, this manic travelogue of a city about to burn, and I can’t even begin to answer.’ Well, James Joyce knew the answer: it’s written all over Ulysses, the Sandymount episode in particular. Sinclair knows the answer too, and so do we all, although we are generally too embarrassed to mention it. Think about the joke about the insomniac dyslexic ...”

“... thought it was so funny – I started it, having picked it up from something I’d been reading by James Kelman. Death, death, death, death, death, death, death.I met her in September 1989, on my first day at City Limits, the co-operatively run London entertainments magazine set up by the leftier of the Time Out journalists after a long and bitter strike. It ...”

“... and gilded, with something of the hippo-and-the-pea effect H.G. Wells observed in the later Henry James: what exactly was it all those words were struggling to capture? Was that hippo wearing a tutu for the hell of it or was it undergoing an emergency of self-definition? Three novels in and Cusk had two babies in quick succession. A Life’s Work shows her ...”

“... as professor of creative writing at Glasgow University, a position shared with Tom Leonard and James Kelman; and nice gigs as a celebrity designer of murals at Hillhead subway station and at the Oran Mór arts centre. In terms of politics, however, Gray and the new Glasgow are at loggerheads. In 1990 he lampooned the European City of Culture festivities in ...”

“... a schoolteacher, gradually becoming, in the late 1980s, a full-time writer – much encouraged by James Kelman, who discovered her work in a short-story competition. She is known mainly for three novels: The Trick Is to Keep Breathing (1989), the tale of a young teacher’s emotional collapse; Foreign Parts (1994), in which Cassie and Rona, West of Scotland ...”

“... particularly nowadays, with so many slots on cheapo channels needing to be filled (witness James Corden and Matthew Horne of Gavin and Stacey fame, currently advertising Lesbian Vampire Killers on the bus shelters of Britain). Meyer, however, has a different answer. She says that Twilight came to her in ‘a very vivid dream’ on the night of 1 June ...”

“... is a book that tells you how to save money. You are, perhaps, against saving, an adherent of what James Meek has called ‘karaoke Keynesianism’ – a position recently expounded on a Radio Four documentary called The Threat of Thrift. Or you are, maybe, keen to save, but against buying yet more stuff in order to do so: for budgetary reasons (‘don’t ...”

“... other urban emporia of recycling, pawn-brokers’ shops; and almost sixty years before Yeats, James Russell Lowell had already seen that literature itself was the random stuff of visceral alchemy: ‘The somewhat greasy heap of the literary rag-and-bone picker is turned to gold by time.’ Much attention has been given to the 20th century’s predilection ...”

“... COP to write something for my paper, I told them, which that morning had published two pieces (by James Butler and Adam Tooze) about Andreas Malm, the Swedish climate theorist and author of How to Blow Up a Pipeline. Malm says it’s time, I said, for climate campaigners to move on from XR-type theatrics to disciplined sabotage of fossil-fuel ...”

“... book?’). Chris tries her best with Charlotte Stant and Maggie Verver, but chirruping about Henry James novels isn’t really what she’s all about. ‘The Dumb Cunt’ is more her style, ‘a factory of emotions’; her passion has sent her back into adolescence, ‘hunched up in a leather jacket’, listening to the Ramones. She’s creeped out ...”

“... America’, and thereby preparing the way for Freud’s own arrival. When William James and many other leading American intellectuals turned out to hear him speak, Freud felt that psychoanalysis had been given official recognition for the first time. ‘In Europe I felt as though I were despised,’ he was to write, ‘but over there I found ...”

“... Casaubon, Mayerne sought, and received, sanctuary at the court of the British philosopher-king James VI and I, where erudition was prized over orthodoxy – or indeed decorum. England was to be Mayerne’s de facto home for the rest of his life. The wars of religion had injected a crucial element of paranoia into court life. Kings and leading courtiers not ...”

“... Ruskin-Carlyle correspondence, Hayman’s 1858 letters) have come out in America or Canada. James Dearden, whose encyclopedic knowledge of the Ruskin manuscripts currently lodged at Bembridge School on the Isle of Wight has proved indispensable to many aspiring Ruskin scholars, is British, but his teaching has not been in a university. Robert ...”

“... demonstration, in Trafalgar Square, complete with mounted police; his graduate thesis, on Henry James, was never finished. With friends he founded the Universities and Left Review, which in 1960 merged with the New Reasoner, then run by Dorothy and E.P. Thompson, to become the New Left Review, of which Hall became the founding editor. He moved to London and ...”

“... Baroness James, making a rare visitation to a blighted metropolitan zone, downriver of Tower Bridge, has written a very useful book, a book on which I will be happy to draw for years to come. That was back in 1972. Title? The Maul and the Pear Tree; co-authored by T.A. Critchley of the Police Department at the Home Office, where James then earned her crust as a Principal in the Criminal Policy Department ...”