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“... gave a stately reading on soprano saxophone of Coleman’s 1959 composition ‘Peace’, with Geri Allen on piano. The tenor saxophonists Joe Lovano and David Murray howled their way through Coleman’s most famous tune, ‘Lonely Woman’. There was a haunting duet between Henry Threadgill, on alto flute, and Jason Moran, on piano, and an electric dialogue ...”

“... broke the story that the CIA funded Animal Farm, John Halas and Joy Batchelor’s 1954 version of George Orwell’s political allegory of the Russian Revolution and its aftermath, played out in a British farmyard. Cashing in on his Watergate notoriety, the rogue spook and sometime spy novelist took credit in Undercover: Memoirs of an American Secret Agent ...”

“... his war service deserved more praise than it got – another instance of his chronic bad luck. Allen Tate once told me that after Ford’s death he helped Janice Biala, Ford’s widow, to sell the author’s papers to Princeton. They rented a pick-up truck and set off to deliver them, but they must have been packed with a carelessness more appropriate to ...”

“... work up much enthusiasm for the post-Olsonian outpourings of the Seventies, most notably Allen Fisher’s Place, Place was set largely south of the river, a nowhere defined by unnecessary particulars. Now Roy Fisher, he could do something with him – but the man had the poor taste to base his mythology on Birmingham. My problem was the contrary ...”

“... Not Be Washington, a consideration of Lee’s failure to defend his country in its hour of need. Allen Guelzo’s new study goes further. An unusual figure in the American academy – an eminent Civil War scholar who is also an outspoken conservative – Guelzo gave an address at Trump’s Conference on American History in 2020. But his portrait of Lee owes ...”

“... Europe – has a destiny that anticipates the destiny of Europe in general. The Hungarian writer George Konrad makes a similar point although he makes it more politically than Kundera. The Czech novelist is telling us that our culture is at risk, in that its fate is bound up with that of Central Europe: Konrad’s point is that we cannot expect peace as long ...”

“... Vauxhall, and like those other popular venues a magnet for foreign tourists. Sixty years on again, George Elgar Hicks’s Dividend Day at the Bank (1859) shows a rich social mix of classes and ages come to collect their divvies. As a precaution, there was blotting paper inserted between each leaf of the Dividend Book to prevent the people signing it from ...”

“... into a room near the top of the Nacional, they offered the kind of Hollywood freeze-frame Woody Allen spoofed in Take the Money and Run: Charles ‘Lucky’ Luciano, the legendary mobster Lansky helped spring from an American prison long before he finished his 30-to-50-year sentence for running a prostitution racket; Vito Genovese, a famous killer; Albert ...”

“... who finds common ground with the pronouncements of Pat Buchanan, the neolithic challenger to George Bush’s renomination in 1992, and William Buckley, the acidulous Catholic pundit, while making us uncomfortable about longstanding liberal assumptions? This brief volume is not an intellectual ‘life review’, to borrow a gerontological term, but a ...”

“... of 9/11, implying that it had shown great leadership in finding what happened that day very bad. George W. Bush has boiled doublethink down to a sticky residue: ‘you’re either for us or you’re for the terrorists’ is its central flavour. But choosing New York for the convention was overweening even by Republican standards: like Woody ...”

“... for reconstructing Europe after the Second World War, named after the US secretary of state, George C. Marshall. Between April 1948, when President Truman signed it into law, and the end of 1951, the European Recovery Programme (ERP) poured more than $13 billion of aid into Western Europe – roughly equivalent to $550 billion as a share of current US ...”

“... life. It makes reading Hansard every week a misery. Only last week (23 November) I read Graham Allen, the new Labour member for Nottingham North, growing greatly indignant over pit closures in Notts. He was answered by Cecil Parkinson at his oily best. ‘The Hon. Gentleman talks as if only Conservative governments have presided over pit closures, but 70 ...”

“... her hair to reveal a long and dazzling diamond earring hanging from her right ear’. The poet George Millaway played to the camera then against it: he ‘chews gum and produces a series of rapid and rather artificial grins directed at the camera and at off-screen observers, alternating these smiles with an unsmiling and rather blasé expression’. There ...”

“... stores (Derry and Toms and Barkers) and the houses in Harrington and Collingham Gardens by George and Peto. The façades of the latter development suggest that the constituent buildings were, like those in the Flemish street front it resembles, ‘erected in casual but emulous sequence by individuals’. In fact, it was a speculation. Some of the ...”

“... like a snake to a bird’, and Ian Stewart’s wife dismissing the Stones’ second manager Allen Klein as ‘a cross between a New York gangster and an undernourished wrestler’. Wyman could never have taken away this detail of the Sixties: Andrew Oldham going to New York’s sinister ‘Doctor Feelgood’ for some amphetamine injections, and haunted ...”