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“... White World-Supremacy (1920), by the eugenicist Lothrop Stoddard. This is clearly the book that Scott Fitzgerald was thinking of when he had Tom Buchanan say, in the opening chapter of The Great Gatsby, ‘Have you read The Rise of the Coloured Empires by this man Goddard? … The idea is that if we don’t look out the white race will be utterly ...”

“... of professional critics, who are favoured: V.S. Naipaul, Nadine Gordimer, David Storey, Paul Scott, Iris Murdoch, for instance. Beyond that it isn’t easy to see much significance in the list – perhaps there’s a nostalgia for the old Empire (Scott, J.G. Farrell, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, plus Nadine ...”

“... seem to her out of proportion – by Lona Mosk Packer (obsessed with the idea that William Bell Scott was Christina’s lover), Maureen Duffy (engrossed in the phallic symbolism of ‘The Goblin Market’), Maurice Bowra, Virginia Woolf. She has, of course, her own explanation. She sees Christina as a warm-blooded Italian conforming through strength of will ...”

“... leaves, she visits the fourth floor of the Manchester Central Library, to sit among Salinger and Fitzgerald in the American literature section: ‘That day, resting my head on my folded arms, it was Joshua Spassky that I thought about. It wasn’t a memory, or a speculation; just that as I blinked at the old book spines, I saw him blinking back at ...”

“... The week​ before he was fired from MGM, late in 1931, Scott Fitzgerald was having lunch with the screenwriter Dwight Taylor in the company canteen when something, or even two things, more disturbing than his own drunken dreams appeared and sat at his table. The apparition was a pair of Siamese twins. ‘One of them picked up the menu,’ Taylor remembered, ‘and, without even looking at the other asked: “What are you going to have?” Scott turned pea-green and, putting his hand to his mouth, rushed for the great outdoors ...”

“... Morgan since 1926, and there is clearly a case for fishing the novels out of oblivion.In Penelope Fitzgerald’s last novel, Offshore, the wide distribution of which may have had the fortuitous effect of sending up the price of de Morgan tiles, two rather forward little girls conspired to fish two out of Battersea Reach, when the tide was down and the ...”

“... forever. Among the memoirs included at the end of this book is one written by an old friend, R.A. Scott-James, who was at training camp with Thomas and found him ‘scarcely recognisable for the same man’. As a sergeant instructor, it turned out that he was not only a good soldier but a good teacher of soldiers, and surely no siege battery can ever have had ...”

“... what in life was boring, transitory, confused, insipid, banal. Dickens and Thackeray and Proust, Scott Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Bowen and Anthony Powell – they are all packed with lunches and dinners, balls and parties, which one would much rather not have been at, but which art has contrived to make glorious for us by proxy. Unfair to compare diaries ...”

“... Ernest Hemingway, Robert Lowell and his circle, D.H. Lawrence, Joseph Conrad, Edgar Allan Poe, Scott Fitzgerald and Edmund Wilson,’ adding that he is now writing a life of Humphrey Bogart. Popular biographies written at such speed need to claim some new revelatory hook on which to hang sales. The Kay Morrison hook might have been harmless had it ...”

“... to settle for long in one place. Her restlessness meant, as her biographers Ruth First and Ann Scott point out, that she ‘lacked a constituency’. In spite of her record of friendships, she felt the pain of isolation, both personal and political. ‘Indeed the two were joined, for her sense of politics included the necessity for the individual to define ...”

“... one party-lover put it, were ‘making the best of the last 24 hours of capitalism’. His friend Scott Fitzgerald tried periodically to give up the booze, but, apparently, ‘his “on the wagon” could mean any number of things, including drinking lots of beer’. Wilson reflected in one of his later journals: ‘I am a man of the 1920s. I am still ...”

“... taught too, for a time. What she wanted, she says fiercely, was to live.One day she is teaching Scott Fitzgerald, the scene where the murderer finds Gatsby in the pool. Raw sunlight and scarcely created grass, the old warm world. She admired the passage and made dutiful notes on it.But as she read it out, she caught the full force of the achieved ...”

“... John C. Spahr climbed the ladder onto the flight deck of USS Carl Vinson and walked to his F/A-18 Hornet. Lance Corporal Lindsay, who did final checks on Spahr’s jet that evening, said he came out onto the flight deck smiling and joking with his fellow marines. The ship is more than a thousand feet long and can carry 5500 personnel; its motto Vis Per ...”

“... girl’. On that occasion he had been competing in the swim with a bachelor friend, Alexander Scott, and the Cavalier Angelo Mengaldo, a former officer in Napoleon’s Army who claimed to have swum the Berezina under Russian gunfire. Mengaldo took to a gondola long before Venice was reached, and Scott gave up at the ...”

“... the figure that inspired it? Sixty years after Punch ran the poem, Knox’s daughter, Penelope Fitzgerald, published Charlotte Mew and Her Friends, in which she observed that her subject would always be an outsider. Twenty years ago Ian Hamilton wrote that Mew’s reputation ‘hangs by a thread’. Her Collected Poems and Prose has long been out of print ...”