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“... the Oppenheimers moved to San Francisco (the family name was changed about ten years later). As a young adult, Oppen came under pressure from his father to succeed in business and reacted by taking his distance. In 1928, while hitch-hiking around the country with Mary Colby, whom he married in Dallas, he bought a little sailing boat; they took it from Detroit ...”

“... Deborah Nadoolman Landis, is herself a celebrated Hollywood designer (Raiders of the Lost Ark; Michael Jackson’s Thriller) and now a professor of design history at UCLA; the show consists of some pieces of her own, and many others from Debbie Reynolds’s collection, recently sold – she had pioneered salvaging costumes from studio wardrobes. Landis has ...”

“... the comic novel: the distribution of appropriate rewards and punishments. One sub-plot involves a young breeder struggling to raise a child and maintain a stableful of thoroughbreds inherited from her grandfather. She attempts to keep the farm going not because she has to, but because it’s in her blood, and her efforts are vindicated when one of her ...”

“... regular and true . . . Seasons were respecting their sequence. Time could be relied on.’ For young Fiennes there was the peculiar and nervy other factor that serious illness had destabilised him, making him hungrier for the enclosing warmth of home and also avid to ‘celebrate my return from the state of being ill’ by lighting out ‘for the new, for ...”

“... notes) Vol. – Volunteer – Thomas Ashe, who died in Mountjoy Prison 25 September 1917, to Vol. Michael Devine, INLA, who died in the Maze 20 August 1981. Above is a dove of peace caged in barbed wire; below the quote: ‘I’ll wear no convict’s uniform, nor meekly serve my time.’ Less ringing, and not attributed to the IRA, is the nearby Bloody Sunday ...”

“... melancholy – what she called her ‘indifference to life’. She had come near to suicide when young, and in 1926 confessed that ‘I have always been haunted by the fear of life and in old age one’s fear becomes a more continuous state of mind.’ That she had not killed herself she attributed to the social habit of Sidney, the therapy of prayer, and ...”

“... 29-year-old who has fallen among bad company, a prodigal genius who has lived fast and is to die young, and whose last recorded utterances, all of them heretical, included the opinions that ‘St John the Evangelist was bedfellow to Christ and leaned alwaies to his bosom . . . he vsed him as the sinners of Sodoma’ and that ‘all they that loue not Tobacco ...”

“... enjoyed a better public image than the Army during the last century and could be choosy in the young men it recruited. Were they such a danger to nice girls – or indeed to nice boys? The purpose of McKee’s Sober Men and True is, in the author’s words, to discover ‘what lies behind the stereotype of the globe-trotting adventurer’ with his ...”

“... to speak in praise. It is jerky, ungrammatical, and created by himself in defiance of rules ... No young novelist should ever dare to imitate the style of Dickens.’ It doesn’t come off here and Ackroyd shouldn’t have done it. The most informative of the interludes is the sixth, where Ackroyd the novelist cross-examines Ackroyd the biographer. ‘Are ...”

“... and relates, as evidence of the pioneer cosmonaut’s humanity, an act of kindness to a certain young poet (can it be ... yes, it was). The epilogue goes back in time to the pre-Revolutionary period and the philosopher Tsiolkovsky, whom Yevtushenko hails as the spiritual father of manned space research. Tsiolkovsky evidently promulgated a vitalist ...”

“... rather than a Conservative from the Shires; he’s also said to have voted Green in 2001. Michael Gove, another ally, is not a toff either and would fit in well at a neocon thinktank. With the help of an earlier generation of Tory modernisers, and a core group of Old Etonians and 1990s Central Office staffers, these men have set about giving the party ...”

“... Weschke is looking down at his hands or the tablecloth, a woman lies slumped in an armchair and a young man holds his head in an attitude of total weariness. At the other side of the table, the poet W.S. Graham is holding forth. He sits bolt upright, stabbing the air with the fingers of one hand; it looks as though an electric shock is passing through his ...”

“... coalition’, ‘citizens of nowhere’) has been flung about like confetti. Some characters (Michael Gove, Jeremy Hunt) have kept reappearing in different costumes; others (Gavin Williamson) played cameos which, in retrospect, seem scarcely real.One reason for this disorientation is the absence of any discernible economic or social progress, according ...”

“... of female society), those who play professional football do not: they are still overwhelmingly young workingclass men. Which brings us to Arsenal. To the extent that any individual club historically stands for this culture (for better and worse) it is Arsenal: no other club has had such continuous membership of whatever has been at the time the senior ...”

“... the masters and who the prentices? Davie quotes Canto 80: ‘For “prodigies” (“Mr Binyon’s young prodigies”) surely we ought to read “protégés”.’ But we shouldn’t delete ‘prodigies’: to lose the pun would be to lose the lugubrious implication that, in this day and age and art, a protégé would be a prodigy. Davie is obliged to ...”