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“... am will be able to tell me.26 January. We are comfortably ensconced in our Weekend First seats at King’s Cross when John Bercow comes along the platform. Not quite the elegant, slightly flamboyant figure one sees in the Commons, he’s in a scruffy suede jacket and, according to the trolley attendant, sitting in standard class, where he is happy to have a ...”

“... parents, and Acker was clearly eager to do both. In San Diego she finished her BA and started at David Antin’s poetry seminar, where she met another student called Len Neufeld. The pair of them ran away from their respective spouses to New York City, with the idea of making it big as writers, just as Patti Smith had a couple of years before.On arriving in ...”

“... Adventures of Augie March (his breakthrough virtuoso solo), Seize the Day and Henderson the Rain King, Bellow had hit the jackpot. The much coveted Bitch-Goddess of Success was now his sugar mama. ‘Guys, I’m rich,’ he declared, and told the poet Stanley Burnshaw that if the din from Herzog grew too loud, ‘I can always stuff my ears with ...”

“... everyone with boisterous condescension,’ Chester Himes remembered. ‘It was obvious he was the king thereabouts.’His place on the throne was shakier than he imagined. The novels he wrote in Paris, where he would spend the rest of his life, failed to deliver on the promise of Native Son, the incendiary tale of a poor black chauffeur in Chicago, Bigger ...”

“... thrashing the air with white sticks, while failing to land a single blow on a Struwwelpeter clown-king bent on slow-puncture abdication by photo opportunity, a different costume or a different country every night. This man changes the rules of the game if he is in danger of losing a piece. Nothing is true, not now. Horrors, incubated over many years: the ...”

“... American culture, began to favour the notion of identity being constructed on the basis of wounds. David Kessler, who was Kübler-Ross’s co-author on her last two books, proposes that the same stages are present in every experience of loss, not just death but divorce, moving house and changing jobs. From here it’s not much of a stretch to the Onion story ...”

“... height,’ he said, ‘and the weight of your chin, I’d recommend a hat with a broader brim.’ David Halperin’s new book, How to Be Gay, addresses the mysterious persistence of discredited elements from pre-Stonewall gay male culture. In theory camp should have been rendered obsolete by the arrival of models of gay behaviour not driven by the old toxic ...”

“... fake jocular, know-your-place remarks of the sort made by Michael Fallon to Andrea Leadsom, or by David Davis of Diane Abbott. In the 1979 general election, which brought the Conservatives to power under Margaret Thatcher – something Harman describes as an ‘excruciating blow’ – 19 women were elected, the lowest postwar figure aside from the 17 elected ...”

“... prose which rises to ranting verse (‘long-stored lightnings loosed/Yesterday ‘gainst some King’). It contrasts the fate of an unlucky, executed groom with that of his more fortunate surviving Prince: and so doing, perhaps hints at a great literary source whose shadow lies behind the difficult opening of the story. Why did Kipling set his tale in ...”

“... the greenhouse effect on earth. At the prompting of a geochemist and oceanographer called Charles David Keeling, the observatory of Mauna Loa on Hawaii had been collecting data on the level of CO2 in the atmosphere since 1959. The result – the ‘Keeling curve’ – clearly showed that levels of atmospheric CO2 were rising sharply. In 1979, Jimmy Carter ...”

“... Blond, Mr Robert Boutwood, Mr Claus von Bülow, Mr Timothy Cassel, The Hon. Mr Alan Clark, Sir David Crouch MP, Mr Nigel Dempster, The Earl of Derby, The Duke of Devonshire ...’ And so on through the alphabet. ‘If I have inadvertently omitted anyone, I ask forgiveness. Some have asked that their help remain unacknowledged.’ Those whose good offices ...”

“... A Life is thus enriched not only by recent studies of the biographical archive (notably David Thomas’s Shakespeare in the Public Records, 1985, and Robert Bearman’s Shakespeare in the Stratford Records, 1994) but by the work of Peter Thomson and Andrew Gurr on the fortunes of Elizabethan acting companies, or of Douglas Bruster on Troilus and ...”

“... went to school: his mother, once a schoolteacher, taught him to read with the help of Gibbon and David Hume’s History of Great Britain, no doubt because they happened to be around the house at the time. The young Thomas read Tom Paine’s The Age of Reason at the age of 13 and became a lifelong freethinker: in 1925, he was to compose a foreword to the ...”

“... of character and the assessment of anecdotal evidence.) There is an accessible biography in print, David Nokes’s excellent Jonathan Swift: A Hypocrite Reversed (1985), but this was written with an eye on the student (and teacher), rather than the non-academic reader whom Glendinning has in mind. Nokes, subtitling his book ‘A Critical Biography’, felt ...”

“... be the husband of Anne Frank in E.I. Lonoff’s sanctum sanctorum, to proclaiming himself a vice king, at one with the polluted, as publisher of Lickety Split. Like a good modernist writer, Zuckerman the pornographer imagines at last the least likely way to dramatise the serious lesson taught him by the chastening ordeal of unhallowed existence.I realise ...”