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“... a huge majority, Gollancz started up the Left Book Club. Here were three socialists – Gollancz, John Strachey and Harold Laski – meeting in a restaurant and establishing a publishing venture which would, over ten years, produce and sell six million books, most of them new, and all of them aspiring to a social order where the common interest would ...”

“... in Victorian London, while Hilary Mantel’s fine, imaginative new novel, The Giant, O’Brien, reviewed in the present issue, dramatises the experiments and predations of the surgeon John Hunter, founder of the Hunterian, as he sniffs out his raw material – including one of the ‘Irish giants’ who showed ...”

“... that becomes even grimmer in Means’s counterfactual telling. When ‘Hystopia’ starts, John F. Kennedy is still alive and is serving his third term as president. But after six unsuccessful assassination attempts, he’s slipped into the thrall of a death wish, which has him conducting coast-to-coast ‘wave-by tours’ in open-air limos and ...”

“... work of MFA graduates and/or instructors), divided into three main groups: ‘technomodernism’ (John Barth, Thomas Pynchon), ‘high cultural pluralism’ (Toni Morrison, Sandra Cisneros) and ‘lower-middle-class modernism’ (Raymond Carver, Joyce Carol Oates), with Venn diagrams illustrating the overlap between these groups, and their polarisation by ...”

“... novels and six volumes of collected short stories, he is an industrious translator of the likes of John Irving, Raymond Carver, Tim O’Brien and Scott Fitzgerald. Once the owner of a jazz bar who only had time to write in the small hours, he is now such a cult figure that there are even translations of his novels, complete ...”

“... babies came from were told that they popped out from their mother’s armpit. In the 18th century, John Hill wrote that ‘whenever we read of Virgins got with Child by Rivers, by Dragons, by golden Showers, &c’ we ought to be sceptical. It was really ‘Wind, nothing in the World but Wind’. There was the prosaic business of making a baby – everyone knew ...”

“... history. The chapter on CIA infiltration of the art world is riddled with howlers (that John Hay Whitney had his ‘own’ museum is one among several mistakes of this sort), but the gist of her argument about Abstract Expressionism and its uses as propaganda is correct, if not wholly original. Who Paid the Piper? is even so a major work of ...”

“... England by Maurice Keen, a delightful collection of Rymes of Robin Hood by Barry Dobson and John Taylor, and a constructive reassessment of ‘the birth and setting of the ballads of Robin Hood’ by John Maddicott, have not only cast a flood of light on the origins and significance of the legend, but also materially ...”

“... contemporary literary figures. Here is Dennis Potter on 17 May, Michael Frayn on 8 September, Edna O’Brien on 15 December, and so naturally I turn to my own birthday. May 9 is blank except for the note: ‘The first British self-service launderette is opened on Queensway, London 1949.’4 January. George F. tells me that when Andrew Lloyd Webber, the Lord ...”

“... this is an evasion. His Sweet bureaucrats are quite unnaturally soft-handed, with nothing of the O’Brien about them at all: but they have destroyed the world. At a later stage of the decline, and of the book, one of them (or some of them, we never find out) conceives the idea of releasing a tailored Aids-style virus which does not kill but renders ...”

“... on conclusions reached in the book I had written. I don’t want to interfere with a discussion by John Bayley which the paper will be publishing shortly: but I would like to diarise a little about this piece of Antipodean duality. Like other strange stories of the genre, it both embodies and attracts coincidence. A strong pang was felt when my eye travelled ...”

“... a couple of years ago when he stitched up a deal to buy the paper off an old friend. Conor Cruise O’Brien wrote at the time: ‘I am not going to ask that Mr Rowland’s ink should print on Mr Rowland’s newsprint such words as might induce fits in Mr Rowland. I do not know whether, if I did write such words, they would actually reach you, but they are not ...”

“... or even fifteen-minute pick-ups, none likely to have any emotional content. As he had told John Lehmann, “I freely admit to having no romantic notions about trade.”’ ‘Their residence in Paris in spring 1965 made clear to both Howard and Gore how much more they preferred Rome. Nightlife and cruising were easier, more casual there, and there were ...”

“... and stability with Leviathan unbound rather than with an unusual degree of constitutional liberty. John Brewer’s paean to the ‘fiscal-military state’ is the most impressive analysis of the way 18th-century Britain actually worked since Lewis Namier anatomised its parliamentary and electoral system in The Structure of Politics at the Accession of George ...”

“... for the cause of anti-imperialism. How else to explain the astonishing reversal of Conor Cruise O’Brien, who wrote the first really devastating critique of Camus as an accomplice of French colonialism in Algeria, and then a few years later enlisted as a defender of Menachem Begin’s Israel, Ulster Unionism and South African apartheid? Gérard Chaliand ...”