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“... or Hanoverian prisoners alive. Fortunately, the commanders mostly ignored the order, although Norman Hampson, in his valuable new book, has found a couple of unfortunate instances where they followed it to the letter. Not a date to recall at official functions of the European Union, you would think. Yet, in a twisted way, Barère’s motion was actually ...”

“... between rich and poor is replaced, or complicated, by the roughly parallel opposition between Norman and Saxon. All the texts of the Esquire period assume that Robin is ‘quintessentially, racially, English’, largely because of his hostility to the Norman French, but it was Scott who traced Robin back to the Saxons ...”

“... as a promiscuously bisexual alcoholic. One memorable scene had John Updike, a friend and rival – Norman Mailer called Cheever and him ‘the Old Pretender and the Young Pretender of the New Yorker’ – ringing the doorbell and being answered by Cheever, bombed out of his mind and stark naked. Home before Dark struck some people as devotedly ...”

“... attention to the analysis of his own writing and there is a particularly interesting letter to Norman Macleod about reading ‘The Nightfishing’ in a radio studio in 1960: good real verse (which is a reflection of the very starts and stops, grimaces and serenities, gestures of the ideas of the mind) should always have its almost hesitation for a moment ...”

“... good question for anyone to ask, especially someone who wrote 18 books and had five wives. Next to Norman Mailer, who did equally well on the spouse-mongering front, Bellow was a worker of slow, monkish application, always tied, seldom happily, to a university department, and agonising over a book. John Updike, who had a modest two wives and wrote 63 ...”

“... life was other than a negative-positive mosquito buzzing in the ear of a total vacuum.’ Where Norman Mailer set out to bend the future with his telepathic powers and the Beats sought to hot-wire the American psyche (at the risk of frying their own circuits), Updike wrote as if he were doing fine draftsmanship under a cone of light, honouring creation and ...”

“... wallpaper on the cover, with ceramic ducks on the endpapers, red Gill Sans lettering and a full-page dedication, with period photo, to Marguerite Patten, ‘one of the original Ministry of Food girls and, since those days, a national treasure … Lots of love, Jamie x’. Like Colquhoun with her black rubbish-bags, Oliver has a vision of ‘filling Wembley ...”

“... Labour government would make Britain a more miserable place; on polling day, in place of a Page-Three Girl, the Sun pictured a ‘former flab-o-gram girl’ as a warning of ‘the shape of things to come under a killjoy Labour Government’. What they wanted was more of what the Tories had given them in their 1988 Budget – LOTSA LOVELY LOLLY. The ...”

“... here anyway. Did you read my letters? Carlos Baker has put them out, a Selection he calls it. On page 867 you will see where it says ‘Carlos Baker really baffles me.’ Well that is understateing it, Pos. A man must really hate you to put out a Life like he did, then follow it up 12 years later with a heap of Selected junk from your private mail. Of course ...”

“... a portrait of Churchill, whose blazing presence and wealth of eccentricity light up almost every page. But in the background a larger subject looms up. Three-quarters of the book depicts the Second World War as seen from the pinnacles of Tory and aristocratic society. Densely populated with characters major and minor, and echoing with the table-talk at ...”

“... time, with a cast of thousands, that stood no chance of ever being completed. (Winogrand admired Norman Mailer, rivalled him in scope, energy, ambition – and in a disdain for any internal system of brakes. As it happens, he photographed Mailer at his fiftieth birthday party in 1973, on the receiving end of a finger-wagging lecture from a guest, so that the ...”

“... an air of premature senescence hangs over The Year’s Afternoon. ‘Three Poets’ elegises Norman MacCaig, Sorley MacLean and George Mackay Brown, a list to which he has added Iain Crichton Smith in the dedication of One Hundred 20th-Century Scottish Poems (2000), a sampler from his earlier Faber anthology. Again the cheering conclusion: ‘Let us ...”

“... of compounds beginning with rail. In order to save money the printer had gone straight into page, in its narrow three-column format at that, with little hope of containing even small additions within the paragraph, let alone the new entries and examples (I speak as an eyewitness) that spread all over the pages. The five supplementary volumes were merged ...”

“... with the question of whether the historic free constitution of the Anglo-Saxons had survived the Norman Conquest and feudalism. Did the ancient constitution persist into the present, as Whig antiquaries contended, or was there a feudal discontinuity in the course of English history, as argued by royalists and Tories? The debate that had most purchase on ...”

“... Paul, by refusing to take him along on this desultory pilgrimage. With two university colleagues, Norman and Alvin, he paddles into the wilderness and promptly drops his torch in the river. He has a disconcerting encounter with a raging, swearing hunter, who drags a deer through the woods in a collapsible wheelbarrow – a ‘one-man danse macabre’ – and ...”