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“... notes, form ‘a ceremonial so poetic, so apparently conscious that, if it were true, it must mark a stage between the highest beast and Man’. But, however poetic the performance,in Europe [the apes] seldom mated. Any collector who wanted a pair of the apes had to incur the expense of sending for them south of the Equator. Accordingly there was only one ...”

“... probably procure the manuscript somewhere, some time,’ he writes airily to an editor at Hamish Hamilton who has inquired about the novel. ‘But I cannot guarantee this of course. Do not tell anyone else about it at the moment, except Mark [Bonham Carter], of course.’ He adds that he hasn’t read the manuscript, so is ...”

“... uncovered a pattern of casual and widespread corruption among officers of all ranks. Sir Robert Mark, the Metropolitan Commissioner at the time, was determined to root out the ‘bad apples’. In February 1976 Mark announced that 82 officers had been dismissed following formal proceedings; a further 301 had left ...”

“... care and curated playlists. As with the Beatles album sleeves designed by Peter Blake and Richard Hamilton, this was where art and pop first locked eyes, before deciding to move in together.Ahalf-century​ on from the band’s messy divorce, you don’t have to go searching for Beatles bumpf: it’s everywhere. They’re as much a part of the public ...”

“... were the regular reviews Kingsley Amis used to write for him at the New Statesman – ‘never a mark on them’.Kingsley Amis might not be a writer people immediately think of in relation to Karl, but Karl’s reach across the literary culture of Britain was so great that it would be harder to think of writers whom he didn’t work with than ones whom he ...”

“... the Castro) and the dykes and queers turn out to be pretty patriotic. (We’re all proud of Mark Bingham, the gay rugby player from San Francisco who helped crash Flight 93 into the ground.) Every few hours I talk to my lover Blakey in Chicago. She lives in a big high-rise off Lake Shore Drive – we don’t know when we’ll see each other again. At ...”

“... to fill in the spaces. The tone of it reminds me of the tone of Lowell’s conversation with Ian Hamilton from 1971, mechanically clever but distant and deaf, all denatured one-liners and musing rhetorical questions. It’s not conversation but the complacent burble of a radio on a windowsill. History is about as broad as Lowell gets, a custard-pie violence ...”

“... novelist, and wickedest of wits Mary McCarthy, who told Susan she smiled too much, the telltale mark of a provincial. McCarthy was also reputed to have said to Sontag, ‘I hear you’re the new me,’ and, to others, ‘She’s the imitation me,’ digs that made their way round the cocktail circuit and into print. The soundbites had plausibility because ...”

“... from an outer borough. New Yorkers hardly have a bias against aspiring newcomers. The musical Hamilton exalts a classic New York story of a brilliant young immigrant rising in a mercantile culture. (‘I hear it’s highly overrated,’ President-elect Trump tweeted last November after the cast addressed Vice President-elect Mike Pence, as he was leaving ...”