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“... Lucas and Clement map out a distinct social territory. It lies in pockets of Hampstead and Barnes, in Oxford north of St Giles or on Boar’s Hill, where large families live in rambling old houses full of innocent laughter and fun, and favourite aunts and uncles and friends of the family come for lunch on Sunday, and amiable dogs bound about answering ...”

“... M.A.K. Halliday, Rodney Huddleston, Geoffrey Leech, Jennifer Coates, F.R. Palmer, R.A. Close, John Sinclair, Jan Firbas, Nils Enkvist, David Crystal, Jan Svartvik, Wolf-Dietrich Bald, Nelson Francis, Morton Bloomfield, E.L. Epstein, John Lyons, Archibald Hill, James Sledd, R.I. McDavid Jr, R.K. O’Cain, Linda ...”

“... conservatives.In the swing state of Pennsylvania (the fifth most populous in the country), John Fetterman, a left-leaning Democrat and a strong supporter of marijuana legalisation and criminal justice reform, defeated a Trump-backed candidate, Mehmet Oz, by 4.6 percentage points, outperforming Biden’s result in the state in 2020; the Democratic ...”

“... and Chekhov’. By this point, White was trying to get a deal to write a book of criticism on John Barth, Robert Coover, Rudolph Wurlitzer and Donald Barthelme. The proposal was rejected. Though ‘crushed at the time’, White was later glad, because metafiction ‘no longer intrigues’ him ‘or anyone else’. It’s ‘the sort of storytelling,’ he ...”

“... but prefer ‘Darjeeling tea from Harrods and black lace stockings from Madame Blanc’. Djuna Barnes, whom Peggy sets up in Paris with five hundred francs, dislikes her free hotel room: ‘It’s rather cold and small … It’s very hard to write when you are in a depressing atmosphere.’ Hart Crane serves Cuban rum to Peggy in a teacup in his wooden ...”

“... and the narrator run a blog called Frances Farmer Is My Sister; both are married to a man called John). The book is a composite creature: part memoir, part criticism, part fiction, part feminist tract or call to arms or self-help manual or biography or work of literary history. Perhaps the best clue to what she’s doing comes when the narrator considers ...”

“... strenuously extruded from the short list. Why, one friend asked indignantly, wasn’t the ‘Amis-Barnes Axis’ on it? The explanation that neither writer had published a novel in 1990 was met by a witheringly sceptical silence. Others seemed unnerved by Bainbridge’s novel, which was patronised as a ‘surprise’ finalist. The surprise was partly because ...”

“... Dynasty range was opened at Blooming-dale’s, 26,000 women stormed the New York store. The actor John Forsythe, who plays the Creon-like Blake Carrington, was beaten over the head at Atlanta airport by a woman who abused him for daring to treat his lovely wife so badly. More disturbing still is the way real life has been vacuumed into the fantasy. In Dynasty ...”

“... of hope wiped off their faces. My next job was with a mass-market study guide publisher owned by Barnes and Noble. I cut corners on the budget by doing much of the typesetting myself, working into the night and showing up late most mornings, a habit I’ve yet to kick. The office was in a blockwide building in Chelsea now owned by Google; after midnight mice ...”

“... night is evoked with much detail, and walk-on cameos by ascertainably ‘real’ 1990 guests – John Major, Richard Rogers, Neil Kinnock and, of course, the richly despised Howard Jacobson. Francis Jay gives an impromptu television interview in which, with all the authority of one who has studied deconstruction at Sussex, he dismisses the shortlisted ...”

“... too. Greetings, borrowers. What I admire – not the word – about the poems is their intensity. John Berryman once said: write as short as you can, in order, of what matters. Surely no one – least of all Berryman himself – can have fulfilled the terms of that prescription as scrupulously as Hamilton. The majority of the poems are generated by one of two ...”

“... American realism, once a belief, is now an idle liberty. Writers such as Robert Stone, Joan Didion, John Irving and even Don DeLillo, are praised for their ‘realism’, for the solidity of their plots, the patience of their characterisation, the capillary spread of their social portraits, the leverage of their political insight ...”

“... exaggerated theories of ‘recovered memory’ syndrome. The same institution harbours Professor John Mack, who believes that beings from outer space are abducting men and women and conducting fertility experiments on them. As Showalter observes, ‘to Mack, looking for material evidence is a logical error, typical of the material bias of Western ...”

“... Rossetti, Arnold, Hopkins, Hardy and Yeats. There are suggestive affiliations, as between Barnes and Hopkins, but no single narrative has explanatory power. A study of the emergence of modern poetry would need at least six lines of affiliation, by my count. More, if we included the American poets. Karlin’s anthology would belie its title, but it ...”

“... dress suit. It might almost be mistaken for the dénouement of an early Sherlock Holmes story: Dr John H. Watson describing the scene in an East End police station when Holmes literally unmasks the man with an old scar running across his face from eye to chin which turned up his lip into a perpetual grimace, a ‘crippled wretch of hideous aspect’ who hid ...”