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“... were if the book started with some such sentence as ‘Alison’s mother, Margaret, had married Roger’s father, Clive, so this was a sort of family honeymoon.’ The phrase ‘family honeymoon’ does appear, but later on, at a point when most readers will have got their bearings. The main cast is completed by the housekeeper, Nancy, and her ...”

“... from the cultural milieu. There was Clive, Fred Halliday, later Sheila Rowbotham got involved, and Roger Smith, script editor at the BBC. The French May erupted as we were about to launch the first issue, which had come out looking slightly miserabilist and unimaginative. It was generally felt that the cover was awful. We voted to pulp it and ...”

“... must apply to the French in the same sense in which they apply to other European societies. When Roger Caillois states that by establishing conditions of equality amongst the players, games attempt to substitute ideal conditions for the normal confusions of everyday life, or when Jean Giraudoux suggests that games are the modern equivalents of ancient ...”

“... Lewis, Ford Madox Ford and, during a brief period when she moved on the fringes of Bloomsbury, Roger Fry. Butts registers their comments, advice and obiter dicta. (Plans have now been announced for a published edition of the diaries, the most important unpublished memoir of the period that I have seen.) In 1918 Butts noted: ‘What we want is a new way of ...”

“... combined blue-white-grey-pink at the bottom of the bed in L’Affaire de Camden Town, in the red-brown hatched brushstrokes on the woman’s shin and breasts, and the way the white shirtsleeve of the man looking down at her becomes duck-egg blue in the shadow, his face terracotta. Look closely at Dawn, Camden Town (sometimes known as Summer in Naples) and ...”

“... Howl, the substitution of ‘breath’ for metre and gossip for metaphor. Adrian Henri and Roger McGough, with their sedulous imitation of the faux-naif Modernism of e.e.cummings, were just as much part of the movement as Ed Dorn, Robert Creeley or Kenneth Koch. With his Essex Poems, even Donald Davie, the very type of the English conservative ...”

“... side by side, high officials of MI5 and MI6, sea lords, permanent under-secretaries, Lord George-Brown, chiefs of the air staff, nuclear scientists, Lord Wigg and others, stand patiently leaking in the public interest. One can only admire their resolute attention to these distasteful duties.’ Pincher describes the comparison as ‘my most cherished ...”

“... was the occasion on which Eliot, at Pound’s behest, delivered a parcel containing a pair of old brown shoes to a distinctly unappreciative James Joyce. The shoes apart, Eliot was having a good time. He considered Lewis the most profitable person he had had to talk to for a long time. In Saumur, Lewis fell off his bicycle, and was soon looking for someone to ...”

“... history’ such as those outlined by the American writers David Christian and Cynthia Stokes Brown – or, in the terminology of Edward O. Wilson, in a ‘consilience’, a convergence of intellectual disciplines, humanities with science. Ultimately, all teaching in the fine arts department pays a kind of homage to self-will. First defined in the 15th ...”

“... concise and to the point here: The term ‘outsider art’ was coined by the art critic Roger Cardinal in 1972 as an English synonym for ‘art brut’ (‘raw art’ or ‘rough art’), a label created by the French artist Jean Dubuffet to describe art created outside the boundaries of official culture; Dubuffet focused particularly on art by ...”

“... Bryan Carsberg of Oftel smiles up in soft brown light as he dangles in the mirror on a green office wall. Michael Meyer of Emess Lighting is dissected by the blinds that cut across him and then reassembled from outside – his shirtsleeved figure looming like a target in the formulaic eye of some Hollywood assassin ...”

“... America. But since these questions come from the Nation magazine, and from Ralph Nader and Jerry Brown, they can be, and are, easily shrugged off as ‘marginal’. Understandably, the Republicans display little relish for dragging up the savings-and-loan scandal, or for raising the question of campaign donations, or for investigating property ...”

“... she was herself French, but we know of two earlier maids in the Mountjoy household – Margaret Brown and Joan Langford – and both were English. Could Mountjoy’s servant and concubine in 1613 be Frances Williams? This is speculation, of course, though it would explain why Mountjoy ends up being charged along with the three Frenchmen. As the evidence of ...”

“... Maeve Brennan​ could stop traffic. According to her colleague Roger Angell, she laid waste to a ‘dozen-odd’ writers and artists after the New Yorker hired her as a staff writer in 1949. She makes a cameo as the magazine’s ‘resident Circe’ in a biography of the cartoonist Charles Addams; legend tells that she was Truman Capote’s inspiration for Holly Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffany’s ...”

“... repertoire. Brindle’s panoramic view gives full credit to Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown, too often shunted into a siding marked ‘garden history’, as ‘a phenomenon’ and ‘one of the defining figures of Georgian England’, whose effect on landed estates was to make them more practical and economical, as well as more attractive.The ...”