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“... a bricklayer”.’ The report, later taken up by other papers, was based on a book by David Baldwin, who asserts that the elder prince, the deposed Edward V, died of natural causes and that, after Richard III was killed at the Battle of Bosworth, the younger, Richard of York, was taken to St John’s Abbey in Colchester, where he worked as a ...”

“... effective weepie cum ghosty in between) Shyamalan had directed Signs (2002), starring Mel Gibson, which made $408 million worldwide. Signs typified a certain aspect of Shyamalan’s movies: you could say it was a thriller about extra-terrestrials, but it makes a strong argument for itself as a movie about belief. ...”

“... The IRA commanders also appear to have become over-confident. The killing of Lord Justice Gibson, number two in the Northern Ireland judiciary, and his wife, and the almost daily grenade, mortar and rifle attacks on RUC/British Army bases, had given the IRA their most successful four months since the late Seventies, when they killed Lord Mountbatten ...”

“... 1986, the centenary of Henri’s birth, Carcanet have brought out Alain-Fournier: A Brief Life by David Arkell, describing him as ‘the noted literary sleuth’. This, I think, does Arkell an injustice. As a sleuth, he hasn’t been able to solve the long-standing problems: what was the surname of the station-master’s daughter? What was Yvonne de ...”

“... rival) were two Oxford graduates who had returned home to Scotland to practise at the bar. John Gibson Lockhart would, within a few years, return south to edit the Quarterly. But for the magazine’s first twenty-five years, its mainstay was John Wilson. As Christopher North, he wrote mountains of copy. Reviews, feature articles, verses, sentimental tales ...”

“... again. George Fenton, who is co-ordinating the music, also chips in, but he’s a musician. David Hunter, the director, chips in too, but he isn’t a musician, just knows what atmosphere he wants at various points in the film. In the finish, even I chip in just because I know what I like. And the musicians just nod and listen, try out a few bars here ...”

“... men honoured for their contribution to our knowledge of the brain: Roger Sperry from Cal Tech and David Hubel and Torsten Wiesel from Harvard. Their discoveries are stunning, counter-intuitive and of no immediate practical consequence. They are therefore widely unknown outside their fraternity. A further reason for their obscurity is that the hard facts they ...”

“... Why should​ poets’ deaths carry more weight than those of others? David Markson’s litany of deaths, This Is Not a Novel, starts off with a poet’s death (Byron’s) and expands to commemorate, in laconic sentences and judicious fragments, the deaths (sprinkled with quotes and quirks) of novelists, painters, composers, philosophers ...”

“... The mood at Batts is one of desultoriness, torpor, ennui. Shortly before Edward’s arrival, Lewis Gibson, best man at Edward and Laurel’s wedding, observes Janet drift across the lawn, where her father lies fast asleep in a deckchair. Janet’s hand moves slowly across the back of the chair, without touching it. Lewis’s analysis of this gesture is a ...”

“... the cowboy statue has sought protection from the elements and taken shelter indoors. Florence has David, also transferred from open to inner space; Orange County has John Wayne. Orange County, where unfettered individualism rises from a government-subsidised foundation in mineral wealth, agribusiness, aerospace and real-estate speculation. When John Wayne ...”

“... randy for antique, could be Hardy himself. Tate and Brady’s New Version of the Psalms of David and Keble’s The Christian Year (Hardy bought his copies of both of these in 1861), together with Hymns Ancient and Modern, the original version of which appeared in 1860-1, furnished him with models, and their influence long outlasted his faith. Not every ...”

“... so on. Then he returns with elliptical reports from which the tribe’s younger storytellers, from David Foster Wallace on, set about extracting a style and a tone attuned to new ways of feeling and not feeling. One constant throughout these risk-filled spirit voyages has been DeLillo’s superbly take-it-or-leave-it posture towards the laity. ‘The writer ...”

“... and history were commonly taught together. The Shakespearean critic A.C. Bradley and the historian J.S. Brewer had chairs in literature and history. In the 1870s the subjects might have grown up as a single faculty at Oxford had not Bishop Stubbs, the Regius Professor of History, vetoed the proposal. When Oxford gave social respectability to Eng. Lit. by ...”

“... their off-screen life. For vulgarity, you need to go to the much more crumpled and ‘adult’ Mel Gibson or Bruce Willis, both of whom still make movies. So aside from representing the all-male reluctant hero in the good movies he made, what was so special about Bogart? Even Kanfer doesn’t think he had much range as an actor. With the right director and ...”

“... would not be permitted to contest the next election: three of them are going quietly, but Ian Gibson, who still has the backing of his local party, protested loudly and with some justification. As someone remarked, in his case it looks like a contract killing of someone who was a thorn in the side of the regime.  A chat with a prominent economic ...”