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“... remark of his, in the TLS, about a subsequent book of mine: ‘There is even a case to be made for Giles Gordon being the only true inheritor of the late B.S. Johnson’s mantle as one of the serious Anglicises of French modes.’ Heady stuff. No British reviewer or critic would write like that now. Many younger readers (older readers too) have no ...”

“... I was well into Giles Gordon’s Aren’t We Due a Royalty Statement? before I noticed that other readers were taking the book seriously, often to the point of denunciation. Up to then I had been assuming that it had set out to be an ingenious spoof, a sort of hoax or parody which had failed to make its intentions thoroughly clear; and that was nothing to be censorious about ...”

“... important respects fewer can mean better, or at least less tacky. The point was made by the agent Giles Gordon in a letter to the Times on 29 July. Gordon argued that the NBA-protected British book trade was forced to produce ‘far too many titles to enable it to achieve a tolerable turnover’. Because they are fewer ...”

“... me in 1992 when I read it in Heinemann’s Best Short Stories, the annual selection edited by Giles Gordon and David Hughes. I made a mental note of the author’s name, Helen Dunmore, because I’d never heard of her before. A name to watch for, I thought, and watched for it in The Best of Best Short Stories, 1986-95. Dunmore was not included, which ...”

“... played Miss Marple’, is present. Also namechecked are Patricia Hodge, Simon Russell Beale, Giles Gordon (once Moorcock’s literary agent), Andrea Dworkin and Iris Murdoch, who ‘sat smiling into the middle-distance while Felix Martin explained the H-bomb to her’. What Moorcock is doing, under the permission of a work of fiction, is contriving ...”

“... the three-mile journey to the gallows. The route to Tyburn Tree snaked through Holborn and St Giles, then went along Tyburn Road, today’s Oxford Street. It was dense with spectators. At Tyburn itself, a hundred thousand people might be in attendance, jostling one another for standing room, teetering on ladders, sitting along the wall that enclosed Hyde ...”

“... secretary for war. That ministers sometimes do not get on is nothing new. No one reading Giles Hunt’s account of the duel between Lord Castlereagh and George Canning can drive from their imagination the more recent feud between Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, accounts of which made me thankful there are no firearms ...”

“... Mark Pearce, her second husband, and Alexander, the couple’s son, born in 1983. As Edmund Gordon says towards the beginning of his biography, Carter was never so widely acclaimed in life as she would be in the weeks and years after her death. The tributes were long, sometimes fulsome, always affectionate, and full of great table talk and funny stories ...”

“... that Southey’s ‘rooms were next to the college lavatories, by an alley that opened on to St Giles’, or the fact that Southey ‘left for Dublin to take up a post as Secretary to the Irish Chancellor, with a salary of £200 per annum, a characteristically efficient career move’. The point about these is not whether Muldoon knows them or not, but that ...”

“... and becomes a radio comedian, a personality. A fruit-eater. A roadside sex pest, a killer. Giles Doughty (Binding names with relish, as if he were launching a board-game), the lecherous weatherman of In the Kingdom of Air, is destroyed by metropolitan pretensions and has to find his salvation by following a knotted string down into the mystery of the ...”

“... president of United Biscuits, which gave £632,500 to the Party during the Thatcher years); Sir Gordon White (head of the US arm of Hanson, which gave £652,000 to the Tories and £100,000 to the Centre for Policy Studies in 1981-90); Sir Jeffrey Sterling (head of P & O, which gave £370,000 during the Thatcher years); Peter Palumbo (Chairman of the Arts ...”

“... Good Business (2002), a polemic-cum-mission statement written by Hilton and his business partner Giles Gibbons, is almost messianic in its faith ‘that not only is it possible to combine profit-making with socially beneficial outcomes, but that we should all work towards a situation in which helping society becomes the single best way to make ...”