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“... published a week before the terrorist attacks, became a runaway bestseller, and the case against Jonathan Franzen and his kind of big social novel did not look so watertight. There may be something too wised-up about these novels, but interest in large-scale fiction has not fallen off after the attacks. Writers quickly settled back into familiar tracks; in ...”

“... a complete stranger in the centre of a crowded dance-floor is still something worth driving 200 miles for; it is worth the risk of arrest on drugs charges, worth a face-off with the police in a muddy field. Indeed, the fact that the state has seemed so concerned to prevent the formation of such obviously communal events is a source of moral confusion for ...”

“... to England at the hands of Mitchell Johnson during the traumatic tour of Australia in 2013-14 (Jonathan Trott, who left the tour early, called Johnson ‘my executioner’). Spinners can’t do that. But they can scare batsmen into thinking they may end up looking like fools. If you are unable to threaten them with injury, you have to threaten them with ...”

“... funeral at the turn of the millennium. A narrative spanning nearly 60 years and more than 8000 miles (the distance from Rome to Hawaii), with half a dozen major characters whose various points of view are given more or less equal weight, all told in a mere 260 comfortably spaced pages: it could easily have been rushed, or cramped, with too much being told ...”

“... out of the room. In reality, Kinsey and his circle were obsessed with Mr X. They travelled 3141 miles from Indiana to the South-West to visit this man they considered a unique specimen (as if he were a new strain of gall wasp), and, Pomeroy records in his biography, they ‘felt that it had been worth every mile’. In an attempt to give his story a moral ...”

“... other prisoners he was transported by train to a prisoner-of war camp in Görlitz, about sixty miles east of Dresden. The journey, more than four hundred miles on a slow train in high summer to an unknown destination, must have been more gruelling than anything he had so far experienced in the war. At one point he ...”

“... style of our brightest young writers. The anthology may not begin with ‘Sunday Morning’, but Jonathan Barker suggests that Ron Butlin, James Lasdun, Oliver Reynolds and other talents have been influenced, like Vendler’s Americans, by the world of Canon Aspirin. This seems doubtful. To read the PBS volume after the Faber Book is to be almost crushed by ...”

“... and the tidal quiff of Clark Gable. Handsome, yes. Real, absolutely not. At any rate, a million miles away from ‘The Laurels’, Brickfield Terrace, Holloway, where the Pooters lived. The good thing to emerge out of this, from the acting point of view, was Olivier’s uncanny gift for physical mimicry. Being a nobody meant he could be a great number of ...”

“... a par with Samuel Johnson’s. He noted that Bage had ‘very seldom’ travelled more than fifty miles from home, had never spent more than a week in London, and considered him raised ‘in the bosom of rusticity’. The truth was rather different. Though not formally associated with any group, Bage had links through Erasmus Darwin with both the Lichfield ...”

“... turn’ in an essay published in Social History in 1992, a tempest ensued. Jon Lawrence and Miles Taylor, two of Stedman Jones’s recent PhD students, insisted that Mayfield and Thorne had entirely misunderstood their mentor’s work, which they felt should be judged not in terms of its theoretical affiliations but according to an empiricist ...”

“... ethnically Greek. He was from Samosata, which was part of Syria in Roman times (it is some 50 miles north of the Turkish border on the modern map). Samosata was the former capital of the Hellenistic kingdom of Commagene, one of the buffer zones between Greece and Persia. Commagene is where the local ruler Antiochus built what is now known as Nemrut ...”

“... judgments, or one in which they would change global reality. Parker has only a walk-on role in Jonathan Nossiter’s superb Mondovino, but he is the éminence grise of one of the most effective and moving political documentaries of recent years. The arch-villain is Parker’s long-time friend, the Bordeaux ‘flying wine consultant’ Michel ...”

“... By now, anyone at all curious about Burroughs has absorbed a few interchangeable synopses of Barry Miles’s Call Me Burroughs – an exhaustive biography in every sense of ‘exhaust’ – along with boilerplate exegeses of the ‘cut-up’ and ‘fold-in’ methods; gleaned the current value of his stock in the literary market; and glazed over at the ...”

“... people who can pay huge sums can’t find anything to rent, because the competition is so fierce. Jonathan Klein, a travel-agency owner in his sixties living with Aids, jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge last year after being driven out of his home, with his business in the Castro facing eviction. ‘EVICTION = DEATH’, a sign at the memorial said, echoing ...”

“... The lives of people in rural or suburban areas – Glover lived in Shelby, a small town 45 miles from Charlotte – were dramatically affected by the internet, whose potential to connect everyone, wherever they were, to everyone else, reconfigured the relationship between the centre and the periphery. Glover’s distribution network, suddenly, was ...”