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“... age of 25 left his home town, Devizes, to become a more or less permanent lodger in the house of Bob Woolley and his family in Sidmouth. Woolley was a fisherman and lived with the fishing community well away from the fashionable parts of the elegant Regency town. In A Poor Man’s House Reynolds describes his own life and work during these years. If he came ...”

“... III not Henry VI – his knowledge is extensive and his touch assured. With the exception of Bob Brand the members of the Cliveden Set tended to take themselves all too seriously. Rose does not take them on their own valuation, and in fine, economical, sometimes epigrammatic prose he has written a thoroughly ...”

“... entries are mere cryptic memoranda, and on a few occasions happiness writes white: ‘After which Bob and I      .’ The type for these provoking blanks may be a boyhood diary he recalled keeping; a strange incident had occurred when he was sent for a walk on the Downs near Eastbourne by his prep-school headmaster, and had been induced to masturbate a ...”

“... may sound as though I’m intending to dispraise the book, but to the contrary; I think it’s a fine piece of work in lots of ways. To begin with, the topic is well chosen. By pretty general consent, Kripke’s writings (including, especially, Naming and Necessity) have had more influence on philosophy in the US and the UK than any others since the death of ...”

“... outlet: she began sculpting in her teens and later earned a degree from the Yale School of Fine Arts. In 1925 she received first prize in a competition sponsored by the Beaux-Arts Institute of Design for a daring draped male nude entitled Disarmament. Over subsequent decades she would work hard – though never with great success – at being a visual ...”

“... of Johannas’. It gave me a shock to realise that the song ‘Visions of Johanna’, by Bob Dylan, at which Salaman nods just this once, was at the same moment playing quietly on my stereo, which it does perhaps once a year. I didn’t bother to try to compute the odds against this happening, and left it as a sharp earful of what Paul Auster calls ...”

“... importance of Holland) visitors can just about afford to take home a volume which includes fine colour reproductions of every picture on view plus 300 pages of text. Reynolds would have been surprised. Indeed, the catalogue is the culmination of the modern scholarly effort to set Reynolds right, or more precisely, to set his 19th-century successors ...”

“... mobster in The Long Good Friday (1980), now showing in a restored version at the BFI, is played by Bob Hoskins in one of his great early performances. It’s hard to imagine that another actor could have displayed the required combination of energy and disarray so well. This character’s problem is that he doesn’t know what’s happening to him, and ...”

“... half-Connor? Now and again the modest but watchful Connor household would be visited by Uncle Bob, a former miner who had risen to become a high-up sort of civil servant, an OBE, no less. The boy Karl observed with admiration Bob’s air of ‘frigid Olympian quiet’, ‘the awe’ of his ‘presence’. His visits ...”

“... of political science, for example, must be a very weird cat. As with (almost) everything else, Bob Dylan has something to say about this. In ‘My Back Pages’, a fine song that connects scepticism with a sense of becoming increasingly youthful as the years pass, he recalls: A self-ordained professor’s tongue Too ...”

“... and white photographs, all taken by Auden, appendices containing pie-charts and graphs, and a fine, coloured folding map. There is an extensive bibliography and one chapter is entirely devoted to an anthology of excerpts from other books about Iceland. The pages of the volume are thick, white unwater-marked wove paper and the whole thing – as eloquently ...”

“... and the Smales see it in all its social and political complexity, and discuss it with a fine conscience. What Nadine Gordimer can do, which is still finer, is to let the book itself enact their situation at a deeper level, putting itself alongside the black Africans – July the servant who is now the host, his wife and family – with a freedom and ...”

“... and cosmic ructions tapering down to the ‘home world’; but also, and infrequently mentioned, a fine ear for rhythm and cadence, and a way of managing lyric in strange and dazzling ways. Prynne, like Mallarmé, has tended to polarise readers around issues of obscurity, but where the Mallarméan poem strives for ever greater linguistic purity (it is in the ...”

“... pastoral exodus as well – nurses, for example. There is a sense in which the Dubliners Bono and Bob Geldof are self-advertising versions of Irish missionaries. The English and Scottish Catholic churches have always relied heavily on Irish priests to minister to parishioners who were themselves perhaps only a generation or two away from the farm in Mayo or ...”

“... Anderson, Laver, Roy Emerson, John Newcombe and Fred Stolle (plus lesser stars like Don Candy and Bob Howe). I wanted to know more about South African tennis during apartheid, which gave rise to Sturgess, Gordon and Jean (his sister) Forbes, plus the colourful Abe Segal, and fine Davis-Cuppers like ...”