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“... constituents, camouflage carried military symbolism into civilian life. It was favoured by the hunter, the code-scrambling hippy, the survivalist, the anti-federalist fantasist. It became the unofficial uniform of diverse malcontents who went off to build shelters, real or symbolic, in the woods of the late 20th century. The reader of these volumes first ...”

“... of news pages and bad for advertisers, yet he would work only for the Magazine and its Art Editor, Michael Rand. Wyndham believed, on the contrary, that people liked reading about diverting, strange, glamorous subjects – and that glamour should not be taken seriously. He was also writing pieces in his own highly original style – pieces that were often ...”

“... of his readers. He added, still more provocatively, that ‘the late great physiologist, John Hunter, used to maintain (and I think he proved it) that the African black was the true original man, and all the others only different varieties derived from him, and more or less debased or improved. If so, what more infallible criterion can there be for ...”

“... meets speaks to him in his own Toscano, the Florentine version of Italian. What language did St Michael speak, the inquisitors asked Joan of Arc, challenging her to prove her visions came from heaven. What clothes was he wearing? Their tone was scornful. Joan flashed back with her usual quick indignation: how could angels not know French? Did the judges ...”

“... heterosexual and needed to feel invested in his work – indeed, he would have an affair with Kim Hunter, the actress he cast as Stella. But beyond that he made a production that celebrated Stanley as a force of nature. No one was more aware of this, or more troubled by it, than Jessica Tandy, who as Blanche felt increasingly intimidated by Brando’s taking ...”

“... drugs had been “dope”, of interest only to bohemians, foreigners and criminals’ – the Michael Pollan of his time.*In the aftermath of The Doors of Perception, the cactus experience appeared in the emerging literature of the Beats and the pages of the New Yorker. Peyote buttons were circulating in Greenwich Village and among anthropology students ...”

“... Clint Eastwood, Lee Marvin, James Coburn, and in England – and in a different, English way – Michael Caine, seldom did anything else. It was also a manner which could not always be easily distinguished from simple idleness. For the first 25 years of Mitchum’s career, his performances were routinely mocked – most consistently by Mitchum himself ...”

“... come back that night to feast on what remained. He paid labourers to build a box-like machan, or hunter’s hide, in the closest tree to the kill, and after work climbed the ladder to the hide with Belli, a member of the Badaga people who worked as estate carpenter and was a renowned shikari, or huntsman. Robin poked his shotgun out of the same small opening ...”

“... clues in their pseudonyms – almost as if they wanted to leave a faint scent for the very clever hunter, the reader of readers. Trevanian, for instance, is the nom de plume of a Canadian Eng Lit academic who writes superselling spy thrillers (The Eiger Sanction is the best-known): here a sense of professional shame, diffidence and fear may have inspired the ...”

“... and balloons; in Thomas Beddoes, the doctor, and his Pneumatic Institute, and his wife, Anna; in Michael Faraday, the physicist; in Charles Babbage, the mathematician and inventor of the difference engine; in Coleridge, Southey, Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats and Byron; in Mary Shelley, Frankenstein’s monster’s creator; in everyone’s connections and ...”

“... power? Runciman is not alone in thinking they can. The same assumption can be found in the work of Michael Mann, of which Runciman has been a severe critic, but whose scale and focus invite comparison. The common source of this bias is Weber – the dominant influence on this cohort of British sociologists. Fixation with power has, of course, gone much further ...”

“... peasant who, having stumbled on political power, is unsure how to wield it. Reporting on Michael Portillo’s visit as defence minister to Slovenia, Romania, Bulgaria and Macedonia in 1996, Anne Applebaum (coincidentally, for the Evening Standard) has a good old chuckle: Up and down the red carpets he walks, Her Majesty’s aircraft just behind ...”

“... from the guslari with pencil and paper. (At times Parry bears a more than passing resemblance to Michael Redgrave’s character at the beginning of The Lady Vanishes, ‘putting on record for the benefit of mankind one of the last folk dances of Central Europe’.) Parry returned to Harvard in September with less material than he would have liked, but a ...”

“... wish for courage. The struggle was always a solitary one: the fate of one man against nature, one hunter against savage forces, with no God to help him. Hemingway founded a style in the space left for heroism. Indeed, that is the way his style works: by never actually mentioning the main anxiety. Writing to his siblings from his desk at the Kansas City Star ...”

“... after Salter had seen a script realised in film, the skiing drama Downhill Racer, directed by Michael Ritchie and starring Robert Redford. Solo Faces is the story of a rock-climbing drifter and his friend and rival and their pursuit of glory through heroic feats on the mountain. In the earlier A Sport and a Pastime, the quarry, the struggled for peak, is ...”