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“... There were too many cooks. Everybody in Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer was in my gag department, including Irving Thalberg,’ Keaton said. ‘They were joke happy. They didn’t look for action; they were looking for funny things to say. You just keep fighting that.’ He had lost his leverage. If he had bothered to read MGM’s weasel-worded contract he would have ...”

“... two, talking about giving peace a chance. A self-satisfied Labour councillor wearing a CND badge. John Berger, the star guest, putting his usual spin on the dishonest line of the Communist Party. No doubt there was a resolution to send a telegram to Downing Street. There was also, I dare say for the sake of ‘unity’, a pro-Chinese speaker (for some reason ...”

“... After Garbo, she was MGM’s number one, by a nose from Joan Crawford, and she married the boss, Irving Thalberg. When the boy wonder died young in 1936, Hollywood’s own rabbi, Rabbi Magnin, provided a suitably dignified funeral oration. ‘The love of Norma Shearer and Irving Thalberg was a love greater than that in the ...”

“... on Germany in 1990, Trevor-Roper faced her down and tore her arguments to pieces. The historian John Habakkuk was an editor of Economic History Review in 1952 when Trevor-Roper’s onslaught against R.H. Tawney landed on his desk. He mused: ‘I find it difficult to decide whether T-R is a fundamentally nice person in the grip of a prose style in which it ...”

“... type of lordly self-belief, nor with the obsessive thirst for fame that motivated a poet like John Berryman. His literary career is often compared pityingly with their astute professionalism, as if, authentic poète maudit though he was, he never quite got the marketing right. Certainly he never managed to create out of his sufferings the suspense of a ...”

“... and always, a writer, flush with rage. He was an elective invisible. The artisan, the artificer. John Bayley, describing James Joyce in a review in this journal, called him ‘the penman of the family’. Praise indeed. A curse from which there is no possible abdication, a lifelong task, and one which Ian Penman has accepted with quixotic and sharp-witted ...”

“... worth speculating about. What, for example, is the truth of the legend that James Mill entrusted John Stuart’s political education to Place? Mr Miles does not touch on it. The story told in Iain McCalman’s Radical Underground is told perforce from the outside. There are no personal records to give an inner logic and life to the careers of the early ...”

“... energetically challenged of late. A mass of modern scholarship, from Nygren’s Agape and Eros to Irving Singer’s multi-volumed The Nature of Love, has, after all, argued the complexity of the integration of sacred and profane sexuality in Christian theology and mysticism; Leo Sternberg has shown how the sexuality of Christ himself figured prominently in ...”

“... agent as its executive secretary and launched Encounter, initially edited by Stephen Spender and Irving Kristol. It attracted a host of leftish public intellectual luminaries as contributors, including Arthur Koestler, who in 1950 inaugurated the CCF at its opening congress in Berlin with a ‘Manifesto for Freedom’. Koestler, along with Spender and other ...”

“... throughout a shimmering and ravishing soundscape of layered sampling and electronics created by John Gosling (aka Mekon). Bolton avoids the term ‘gothic’, but it haunts the show. Alexander McQueen has entered that part of the afterlife where Marilyn and Amy Winehouse, Janis Joplin, Kurt Cobain and Peaches Geldof are ...”

“... was to be socially as well as musically discordant; it is no accident that the primary business of John Stark, publisher of Scott Joplin’s most famous rags, was the selling of pianos. The arrival of the cheap domestic piano hastened the decline of field songs and ‘spirituals’ among former slaves, but by and large failed to establish a pious white ...”

“... social status; Amy’s family were vaguely theatrical – her father had been a manager for Henry Irving – and thought of themselves approvingly as ‘bohemians’, too good to marry into ‘trade’ (though Amy’s mother was from a family of grocers). The large brick terraced house in Clapham belonged to Amy’s family and its hallway was hung with ...”

“... the spaced-out flower children of Haight-Ashbury and Carnaby Street, it had all been done before. John Cage’s virtuoso performance of musical silence was merely a variation on a theme Malevich had presented a generation earlier in his canvases of solid colour. When Jim Dine drew an automobile, erased it, and then started over again, he was echoing ...”

“... and confident a vision of America’s role in the world or its responsibilities at home as John Kennedy. The liberal confidence he and, for a time, Lyndon Johnson came to represent produced, in the early Sixties, an impressive array of domestic and foreign initiatives. The liberal agenda was an ambitious one, but at the time few doubted the nation’s ...”

“... Life, invented by Milton Bradley in 1860, which was itself a reinvention of Elizabeth Newbery and John Wallis’s moralising New Game of Human Life from 1790. The 18th-century version had a snakes-and-ladders set-up: players were sent forward to maturity when they landed on virtues and back to childhood when they landed on vices. It was unplayably boring; the ...”