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“... are snitches. What did the local liquor store owner in Woody Creek, Colorado, know about Hunter Thompson? The make of his car and that he was going to appear on the Today show. The main snitch in Ray Bradbury’s file was the actor and screenwriter Martin Berkeley, a former Communist Party member who gave around 160 names to the House Committee on ...”

“... cartoonist, Goya. Thanks to the pioneering researches of a handful of historians – above all, M. Dorothy George and Herbert Atherton – the basic documentation of the rise of the political print is fairly secure.† The history is, however, full of ambiguity. On the one hand, graphic satire figured ever larger in the arsenal of the fourth estate. In peak ...”

“... apricot frock’ in Quicksand (the character was based on the Black actress and model Anita Thompson, who was so beautiful that Coco Chanel gave her dresses). When Larsen was found dead in her apartment in 1964, she was wearing a black sweater over a plain blue dress and black socks. The socks, in particular, would have appalled her younger self. What ...”

“... There is a brief life of Butchell in the first Dictionary of National Biography; it was written by Thompson Cooper, who had an eye for such characters, and who contributed over 1400 biographies, more than anyone else to the original dictionary. Cooper made no claims for Butchell’s importance as a physician, or as an innovator in the history of ...”

“... of poets – she and her husband, Wilfred Meynell, also nurtured the talent of the wayward Francis Thompson. Meynell found the meanings ‘crowded’ in Williams’s early poems; it’s a relief she was spared the later ones. With his taste for ritual and belonging, it’s something of a surprise that Williams didn’t join Meynell in the Catholic ...”

“... but they kept a decent arsenal: ‘shotguns galore, three rifles and half a dozen handguns, a Thompson sub-machinegun, a couple of grenades and numerous knives and swords’. All the trimmings for a good night out. There was nothing casual about the way the gangs dressed for history. They were as serious as the America-obsessed Parisian hoods of ...”

“... had recently transferred to an airy new site in Beckenham when Beckett’s friend Geoffrey Thompson got a job there as a house physician in 1935. Murphy wangles himself a job as an attendant in the asylum, which Beckett renames the Magdalen Mental Mercyseat. Murphy/Beckett was two years younger than my grandfather, who was at the time working as an ...”

“... must have been like all that hot afternoon. She then tells me about a programme on Francis Thompson she’d heard on the wireless, how he had tried to become a priest but had felt he had failed in his vocation, and had become a tramp. Then, unusually, she told me a little of her own life, and how she tried to become a nun on two occasions, had ...”