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“... the public author: his successes, his reviews, his celebrity friendships (with Alec Guinness and Stephen Fry), his celebrity spats (with Salman Rushdie). There is little about his son from his second marriage, Nicholas (who writes as Nick Harkaway), and practically nothing about his relationships with his three sons from ...”

“... of this world, dividing its genius between ‘the two best scalpers of their generation’: Nicholas Lane, a former rock musician who survives on cocaine, and Dryfeld, a figure who found his name in the Whitechapel Library. Without fixed abode or even substantial bodily form, Lane and Dryfeld are ghostly presences who slip the net of social ...”

“... and each had demographic consequences that reach into the present. The historians R.W. Davies and Stephen Wheatcroft have put ‘excess deaths’ from the First World War, Revolution and Civil War – including those caused by disease and mass hunger – at 14.5 million. The effects on the Soviet population of political repression and the famine of 1932-33 ...”

“... for an American public assumed to be reluctant to prolong its global mission. As the historian Stephen Wertheim has recently found, ‘isolationism’ wasn’t a word with much currency before the war; New Dealers fashioned it into a term of abuse to tar dissenters from US globalism – including those at home who were still committed to the equal legal ...”

“... through the plotting of the vicious headmistress, Miss Trunchbull. Dahl’s American publisher Stephen Roxburgh – with whom he fell out after taking his advice – suggested that he rewrite the story, and the revised, charmingly moralised vengefulness of Matilda, who channels her rage into telekinesis and frees darling Miss Honey from her horrible ...”

“... by the prime minister. Our fearless leader is a democrat only as and when it suits him. 20 March. Nicholas Hytner has shown the script of The History Boys to one of his former teachers at Manchester Grammar School, who says that teaching these days is so circumscribed that many traditional tools of the trade are now impermissible. Sarcasm, for instance, is ...”

“... up to £395,000), this is a tremendous example of aspiration coming to fruition,’ says Stephen Oakes, area director for English Partnerships. Inch by inch, the working canal between Limehouse Basin and the Islington tunnel has become a ladder of glass, connecting Docklands with the northern reaches of the City. Footballers, with loose change to ...”

“... novelists – a notable example being the co-operative sleuthing of Sherlock Holmes and Freud in Nicholas Meyer’s adventure The Seven Per Cent Solution. Many American and British novelists, from Truman Capote to Piers Paul Read, have taken on the non-fiction thriller. But the benefits of fictional devices to serious non-fiction, from the days of André ...”

“... now excite opprobrium, his framing of the issues has retained its centrality and pertinence. As Nicholas Seager, in a study cheekily entitled The Rise of the Novel, put it: ‘“The rise of the novel” is one of the most widely circulated narratives of English studies.’ There has for some time been a tendency to condescend to the literary criticism of ...”

“... Carpenter’s excellent life of Auden has a nice turn of phrase in recounting the moment when Stephen Spender, arrived in an Oxford of the later Twenties which was pervaded by the legend of Auden, at last met his fellow undergraduate and ‘found the reality just as remarkable as that legend’. The story appears to have come from Spender, himself ...”

“... fool’: Pasternak’s relation to Stalin was not so very different from Pushkin’s with Nicholas I. But Pasternak had to do consciously and with painful craft what for Pushkin seems to have been instinctive: adapting himself to the regime while retaining wholeness of being. For Mandelstam and Akhmatova such a process was impossible. They either did ...”

“... an anachronism; emphasis on the saint – available in copious quantities, from William Roper, Nicholas Harpsfield and Thomas Stapleton in the 16th century to E.E. Reynolds and the pages of Moreana in the 20th – a plaster image. More the Humanist and More the saint are thus convenient and unsatisfying fictions. More’s Humanism was tempered, in fact, by ...”

“... time I heard him speak was over lunch, when someone mentioned an article in the New York Times by Nicholas Kristof. What we needed to know, Page piped up, was that the New York Times was prejudiced against his boss. We really didn’t need him to come all the way from Russia to tell us that. The mystery was what he could possibly be doing on the Trump ...”

“... of the USA, credit-rich geeks, surfers with trembling fingers. The ones who are currently sampling Stephen King. When the investment pays off, the nouveau plutocrats buy into old-fashioned bricks and mortar. Property prices soar. Clerkenwell booms from the Euro-rinsed Smithfield meat market, through Cloth Fair, back to Hoxton and Shoreditch. The psychic ...”

“... Bellow has read and taught all his life, allows Buck Mulligan in Ulysses to give a comic twist to Stephen Dedalus’s similar pretensions that he is of divine origins and divinely inspired: I’m the queerest young fellow that you ever heard. My mother’s a jew, my father’s a bird. With Joseph the joiner I cannot agree. So here’s to disciples and ...”