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“... writes for Boxing News), the poet Craig Raine (who doesn’t) and the playwright Sue Townsend of Adrian Mole fame. I had many misgivings about the trip, particularly in regard to creature comforts. I wondered, for instance, if the Russians had got round to mineral water. John Sturrock reassured me. ‘Haven’t you heard of Perrierstroika?’ The ...”

“... be standardised critically in terms of other people and their conventional problems. To assert, as Adrian Wright continually does, that familiar traumas and ‘terrible truths’ lie under it collapses art into convention, and indeed into banality. Shorn of the disguise that is itself, the allurements and the personality of its humours, it can look no more ...”

“... time, with its empty rooms and unread notices, from the laser-printed addition to the men’s room door that asks ‘Do you want to find a gender-neutral restroom on campus?’ to the flyers for folk-singing and rocketry, and the posters that want to know if you’re depressed or interested in sailing. It’s an exercise in the modelling of negative space ...”

“... have mystified the corrida, obscuring the fact that it’s manmade – i.e. has a history. Adrian Shubert’s most bracing contention is that, far from epitomising the anti-modernity periodically mourned by Spanish intellectuals, bullfighting was from the start a sign of advanced capitalism. Rather than confirming Spain as the savage of Europe (Ortega ...”

“... World War on the winning side should count ‘the Prof’ as one of those who helped win it. Adrian Fort, in his good-natured but shrewd biography, comes down on that side of the argument, and so do I. But it was touch and go at times. The momentous conjuncture of Churchill with Lindemann did not occur until both were in their middle age. Lindemann in ...”

“... discoursing as you went. The clamour among competing exegetes today has become deafening. Adrian Forty’s enterprise in Words and Buildings is to reap all this architectural verbiage and run it ruthlessly through the logic-mill. Having winnowed his crop, he sorts it into heaps of words, of different sizes and kinds; then he takes 18 of the most ...”

“... prayer like a furious wind, preparing the great spectacle of disaster, fire, decomposition.’ As Adrian Sudhalter, the co-curator of this show, puts it: ‘The idea of an international Dada anthology for which contributions might travel through the mail as surrogates, in effect, for individuals forbidden to do so in that epoch, registered as not only ...”

“... small worlds – boarding houses, hotels, a plague-sealed town, a single day in a prison, a bare room. These reduced spaces intensify the fictionality that made them: they are as bound as a book. Depending on the intensity of the reduction, plot slows down to an agonising verisimilitude, because the writer needs both to entrap the reader and to persuade the ...”

“... Adrian Stokes’s Stones of Rimini is an extended obeisance performed by a young Englishman before some marble panels in an Italian church. The panels were carved in the 1450s, mostly by a Florentine called Agostino di Duccio, who was working in Rimini for the local warlord. Three dozen illustrations punctuate Stokes’s reissued text of 1934 ...”

“... by Notes. When I was a student I appeared in a play by Michael Codron, directed by his friend, Adrian Brown: just before we went on, Codron appeared to give us a Note. ‘Adrian is making this too heavy and Germanic,’ he said. ‘I want it to be light, French, a soufflé.’ This confused us performers and wrecked the ...”

“... property was over. Makers of ideas would henceforth have to live on prestige alone. In Adrian Johns’s account, intellectual property rights have always been precarious. According to him, the concepts of intellectual property and intellectual piracy arose as delayed responses to the advent of printing and the development of a commercial book ...”

“... and in the Great Library there was a performance by Eileen Atkins of Woolf”s A Room of One’s Own. ‘How well she did it! And what a beautiful, moving and dignified text it is. The audience listened in a rapt silence and at the end I had tears in my eyes.’ Among the Bloomsbury ‘items’ commissioned by Kenneth and Jane Clark was a ...”

“... He grabbed my suitcase with one hand and my elbow with the other and guided me off to the Press Room. Therein, dead-centre, was a small stage flooded with television lights, and on the stage a couple of black leatherette TV armchairs. An airport interview! Reluctantly, I marched towards the lights: ‘Where do I sit?’ The pressman was not in the least ...”

“... found his father’s body. He also describes his incontinent grandmother moving spectrally from room to room and asking if it’s time for a drink while he and Yngve scrub the place down. One night before the funeral they give in and get drunk with her. She tells them that the Occupation wasn’t so bad, that the ...”

“... amusements made possible the affair with Wallis Simpson and so led eventually to the abdication. Adrian Tinniswood, whose book combines a panoramic view of life and architecture in the interwar years with pin-sharp detail and the sort of springy prose that comes with a complete command of the material, takes the idea of the weekend as both an embodiment of ...”