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“... is on the phone to the William Morris Agency. Standing in his office are Jerry and Joe – Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis – a bass and a saxophone player. Jerry tries to persuade Poliakoff to give them the job – three weeks in Florida with Sweet Sue and her Society Syncopators – but Poliakoff tells them to beat it, they require female ...”

“... will not easily endure the information that she once wrote: ‘I don’t care what it is, Uncle Jack, if you’ll only tell me what’s turned my father into a nigger-hater.’ Imagine waking up to learn that Hamlet killed his own father, that Pip had been scheming for money all along. Imagine discovering that Sherlock Holmes, in a previous version, was a ...”

“... the poor. Actually, gangsters in movies are always giving things away to children and widows, as Jack Nicholson hands out groceries at the beginning of The Departed; but this is just one more expression of their unlimited reign. ‘Uneasy lies the crown,’ Nicholson says later in the movie, misquoting Shakespeare, probably on purpose. What he means is he ...”

“... on his enemies. The underling was working towards the Führer. Alastair Campbell, speaking on Andrew Neil’s Daily Politics, thinks the proper analogy is with football. McBride was a rogue player so set on mindless aggression that he fouled people all over the pitch. He was like a footballer who was happy to kick his own teammates. I’m with ...”

“... the perennial murmur swelling to a growl – is currently in crisis (again). Earlier this year, Andrew Marr certified it dead. (He was announcing the shortlist for the Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction at the time. His verdict may prove to be no less premature than Johnson’s pronouncement on Sterne: ‘Nothing odd will do long. Tristram Shandy did not ...”

“... each sent a Fortnum’s hamper for Christmas. He names the names: Simon Heffer of the Daily Mail, Andrew Pierce of the Daily Mail, Christopher Hope at the Daily Telegraph and Caroline Wheeler at the Sunday Express. He even quotes Heffer’s thank-you note: he found the hamper at home when he got in after ‘an arduous day killing pheasants’. The team at ...”

“... Flannery O’Connor, Chinua Achebe, Georges Bernanos, Kate O’Brien, Maurice Gee, Brian Moore and Andrew O’Hagan, have made a big effort. Others, such as James Joyce, have managed to weave religion into a larger fabric, with all the sheer drama of faith and doubt, and have managed also to include the comic possibilities of dogma and ritual to liven up their ...”

“... not forgetting the manager, even, without whom there would he no gigs, hotel rooms or backstage Jack Daniels on the contract rider. And then there is the bass-player. The bassist is the other man in the band. This is the guy who is only the other half of the rhythm section: the one who only backs up the drummer: who keeps the beat without setting it: whose ...”

“... Porter was Margaret Thatcher’s mini-me; they were even both the daughters of grocers, though Jack Cohen’s Tesco proved to be a more lasting success than Alderman Roberts’s shop in Grantham. Porter rode high in public and party esteem thanks to a passionately media-friendly campaign to clear the streets of litter, and then by keeping Westminster rates ...”

“... so bizarre. Let us lower the sights a little. There are distinguished poems here by Jill Bowers, Jack Barrack and (a practised hand, which shows) Charles Edward Eaton; from William Radice (a beautifully imagined variation on Virgil), and Mark Beeson (a similarly accomplished essay in the Dantesque); from Pauline Rainford, Monica Ditmas, Anne Stevenson ...”

“... to target minor offences and endorsed by Mayor Giuliani in New York, was eagerly taken up here by Jack Straw but has failed to make a lasting impact on crime in either country. Minton also looks into the Asbo system, dominant until recently in the social policing of Manchester and some other cities. The legislation which brought in Asbos, she explains, came ...”

“... news to him. ‘Our newspaper is delivered by a middle-aged Iranian driving a Nissan Sentra,’ Jack Gladney says in White Noise. ‘Something about the car makes me uneasy – the car waiting with its headlights on, at dawn, as the man places the newspaper on the front steps. I tell myself I have reached an age, the age of unreliable menace. The world is ...”

“... Texas governor, John Connally; and Oswald’s own murder while in police custody at the hands of Jack Ruby, a Dallas nightclub owner. Despite these anomalous features, Kennedy’s assassination was – conceptually speaking – a straightforward event. While academic historians have had plenty to say about his politics and legacy, they have largely ignored ...”

“... colour, grace and music. Here he is at 15, writing a wee squib about the Pentland Rising: Master Andrew Murray, an outed minister, residing in the Potterrow, on the morning after the defeat, heard the sounds of cheering and the march of many feet beneath his window. He gazed out. With colours flying, and with music sounding, Dalzell, victorious, entered ...”

“... business hang-out of the era, Jolson makes his first appearance as the mature Jakie, now known as Jack Robin. The entire scene is redolent of his liberation from tribal taboo. Jack wolfs down an unkosher breakfast with ragtime ebullience, turns a lusty eye on his gentile patroness and then launches into ...”