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“... of his novel, Plot, won the Best Screenplay Award at the 2007 Shanghai TV Festival; Mai Jia took the producer to court over which of their names should appear first in the credits. When The Message – a film based on one of the elements in Plot – was released in 2009, he got embroiled in a legal dispute about self-plagiarism. I can’t recall any of ...”

“... in the Public Works Department, while their sister married two civil servants in succession. John Lawrence, the future viceroy, was one of five brothers working simultaneously in India; John Nicholson, the hero of the siege of Delhi, was one of four brothers who died there. No family, however, sent as many members to ...”

“... counting those in Washington). Alcatraz, which had been a military prison before the Feds took it over, wasn’t big; it couldn’t be, because there was no water on the island. Every drop of water used there – and the island housed the guards and their families as well as the prisoners – had to be brought in by boat. The per capita cost of ...”

“... activists among the thousands of Luo who would travel to the city for the funeral. The Government took no chances. Mortuary and forensic formalities were hastily completed and the funeral service scheduled for the Tuesday, barely 72 hours after the murder, which didn’t allow much time for the long journeys that many would have to make from the Luo homelands ...”

“... Mr Gray’, or some equivalent. By one account, when, near the end of his life, Gray visited St John’s College to meet the son of an acquaintance, ‘every College man took off his cap as he passed, a considerable number having assembled in the quadrangle to see Mr Gray, who was seldom seen.’ Gray managed the ...”

“... we believed, they were pro-British, not as Irish as we were. And our party, Fianna Fail, once it took over power in 1932, did not represent interests, big or small, but the whole nation, or so its rhetoric went; it was not a political party, but a national movement. It believed itself to be the natural party of government in Ireland, and to some extent it ...”

“... them. They are rarely loved as much as Shakespeare’s sonnets or the verse of Jonson’s friend John Donne. His plays are a different matter. Among his contemporaries no dramatist other than Shakespeare has overtaken him. The depictions in his comedies of social and economic fantasy, and of their exploitation, have never seemed more pertinent than amid our ...”

“... with more than 50 per cent of the votes cast in their constituencies, 44 (including Tony Blair and John Prescott) were elected with over 70 per cent, and two with over 80 per cent. By contrast, only 14 Conservatives won more than 50 per cent of the votes cast. The most successful Conservative, John Major in ...”

“... John Berger’s selected essays run to nearly six hundred pages, yet that is just the tip of the iceberg if one looks at the totality of his published work: the essays and reviews about the visual arts – drawing, painting, photography, film – but also short stories, journals, screenplays, travel articles, letters, television scripts, translations, novels, poems, even a requiem in three parts which gives a wrenching account of the untimely deaths of three of Berger’s neighbours ...”

“... sea.’ The weird uplift the rhyme gives to ‘we’ lends the doldrums a flicker of impudence. John Bayley heard in these lines Auden’s enjoyment ‘of the possibilities of making the situation stylish … the esplanade, and the hilarious precision of sopping and dingy, only give the reader that retrospective warmth which comes from remembering the ...”

“... and went to AA. And one day he asked me if he could borrow a briefcase I’d got for Christmas. He took the briefcase away and it was soon filled with ‘literature’ about alcoholism and recovery. He had a copy of something he called the ‘Big Book’ in there too, and so, in my mind, the bond between heavy drinking and writing was forged. When I thought of ...”

“... experience of terror’ to put the government’s case, such as the Glasgow ‘folk hero’ John Smeaton, who wrestled a burning suicide bomber to the ground (nobody got round to asking Smeaton if he had a view on the matter). But what’s really farcical about the situation isn’t that Davis is about to fight a one-man crusade against himself. The ...”

“... ever since it was exhibited in 1971. Mel Gooding, in his monograph on Ayres, records the gallerist John Kasmin asking her: ‘What am I meant to do with them?’ ‘You’re a dealer: I’m a painter. I must get on with what I want to do.’ The tone of that is typical. One-foot-out-the-door-ness flavours the whole Ayres operation and has, despite Kasmin’s ...”

“... they don’t push the station entrances to left and right the way the one at Paddington does. I took the train to Maidenhead from one of Paddington’s more obscure, post-Brunel platforms. The last of the broad-gauge lines Brunel specified were replaced with standard gauge in 1892. (In one weekend – from daybreak on Saturday, 21 May to 4 a.m. on the ...”

“... thirty million – roughly one in four – Americans. The celebrated ‘voodoo Macbeth’, which took an all-black cast into Jim Crow country, disrupted a creaking Shakespearean tradition, transporting Dunsinane to Haiti, getting rid of kilted thanes and launching the career of Orson Welles. A much needed (still needed) strand of documentary theatre was ...”