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“... Not while Rupert’s still around. And while Rupert’s still around (and Sir James, and Robert, and Tiny – and maybe even Victor: ‘I have the papers in which to give my views, but I think the House of Lords will be better’), reports of the ‘death of the press barons’ are somewhat exaggerated. The British certainly like to give the ...”

“... Smollett, always a Tory critic of commercial ‘progress’, was sick and disenchanted, living in self-exile in Italy. It is always supposed that Bramble’s disgust was also Smollett’s. Yet the form of the fiction says: ‘take your choice.’ Either, here is every absurdity of appetite posing as elegance; or, here are the delights and excitements of a ...”

“... texte, or even prose. The nomenclature is revealing. Unlike the novel, the short story has no self-evident canon, is full of exceptions, and its official history seems to need the reassurance of those novelists – Stendhal, Dumas, Balzac, Hugo, Zola – who tried their hand at storytelling.This anthology is the latest Penguin national showcase (volumes ...”

“... had a phenomenal digital gift, a perfect memory, a very high intelligence, but in addition he was self-conscious and self-observant to an extent most other performers would scarcely be able to imagine. This was not just a matter of takes and re-takes of everything he played, but also of imagining and thinking about himself ...”

“... Dan Bern. His parents moved to Mount Vernon, Iowa, where Bern was born, round about the time that Robert Zimmerman started calling himself Bob Dylan and left Hibbing, Minnesota, to head circuitously east for New York City. Where Bern stands in relation to Dylan isn’t straightforward. He isn’t anything so crude as a tribute act: he performs his own ...”

“... of kids in a Frank Capra film. They are presided over by Joseph Kennedy, a fabulously successful self-made father with connections in Hollywood, Wall Street, Washington and London, and by Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy, a devout but fashionable Catholic mum, as at home on the golf links or the ski slopes as in Windsor Castle. After making millions in banking, real ...”

“... yielded the poorest literature. With the exception of two lucid studies of its foundation, Robert Hildebrand’s Dumbarton Oaks (1990) and Stephen Schlesinger’s Act of Creation (2003), each the work of a serious diplomatic historian, little or nothing of analytic interest exists about the organisation, which has proved an intellectual sink-hole, down ...”

“... and the disintegration of the unified character with their overview, their version of unity (a self-mocking unity, full of pratfalls but nonetheless reassuring). In this novel humour is not the medium in which everything is suspended, it’s intermittent and not to be relied on, or possibly so black it’s hard to recognise. Jenny Diski’s oeuvre to date ...”

“... A chorus of woe prompted by the recession of 1980? No, all remarks made in 1948, and quoted by Robert Hewison in his forthcoming cultural history of the period, In Anger. Publishers are like farmers. When times are good – as they were spectacularly during the years after 1974 when the pound was weakest abroad – it’s difficult to get them to admit ...”

“... moving – especially, here, the love poems, or rather the poems of separation, and the occasional self-contained play of imagination, like ‘Truce’, a recreation of the Christmas fraternisation between British and German troops in 1914. Thomas Kinsella is the kind of poet you either can or can’t take. He is very strong meat. After an auspicious ...”

“... to be reversed. It is a love letter by an aging and ailing man in a world which valued dignity and self-control. Clearly, if things had gone better, the new house in St David Street would have had a mistress. The added material in the book does not really justify the title of a new edition, since it could well have been put across within a learned article, and ...”

“... of Colin and Caroline, holidaying in Venice, attracts the fascinated attention of the sadistic Robert, who has already nearly killed his wife during their sado-masochistic sexual sessions, and eventually succeeds in calmly murdering Colin. In The Innocent the engagement night of Leonard, the callow English hero, and his German lover Maria, is interrupted ...”

“... and curves and flat, bright colours; the subversion of women as mothers or sex objects; Warholian self-promotion and self-mythologising; the refusal of perspective (in both senses). And also a quality that runs through all her work which you might call childlike ...”

“... measure of admiration as a scholar, a lawyer, a writer and a politician; for there is much in Robert Bolt’s adulatory A Man for All Seasons which reflects what we know of More. But More was not simply a principled Catholic; he was also something of a fanatic. The Victorian historian J.A. Froude described him as a merciless bigot. He described himself in ...”

“... riff about being cheered for breaking wind in the street (after hours of Wagner): ‘Then a self-important thought came in my mind. Supposing that they knew this old man walking along Long Acre and farting was Stephen Spender – what would they think?’ Leavis, he reckoned, would not have been amused. This is not the utterance of the goose or juggins ...”