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“... not forget the splendours of that heyday, in Bath: ‘The most fashionable library before 1800 was James Marshall’s in Milsom Street, where from 1793 to 1799 the mostly aristocratic and upper-class subscribers included two princes (the Prince of Wales and Frederick, Prince of Orange), five dukes, four duchesses, seven earls, 14 countesses, many other nobles ...”

“... Sherwood Anderson (64), George Santayana (61), Henry Miller (56), Emerson (55), William James (49), Nietzsche (46) and Anaïs Nin (40). These are only the familiar names; the unknown table-talkers, maxim-mongers and cracker-barrel wiseacres buttonhole the reader hardly less repetitively. Among the prolific pronouncements on human nature and the ...”

“... hand. It is a baguette. Later, after the Germans have started bombing the British forces, Robbie Turner sees, across a field, the head of a fellow soldier, resting on the soil. McEwan doesn’t need to say what we are thinking, that he has been decapitated. As Robbie approaches, he sees that the soldier is not dead, but knee-deep in a grave he is digging for ...”

“... who slaughtered five thousand wild beasts on the opening day of the Colosseum. It was left to James I to popularise baiting as an attraction at the Tower, thus promoting the sport from the disreputable status it enjoyed in the urban bear gardens. For better viewing, James refashioned the Lion Tower, but there was little ...”

“... Honourable Artillery Company, was a devout Christian who launched the Hammer House of Horror (Sir James Carreras). All demonstrated that a spell in uniform, as the sovereign’s trusty and well-beloved, never cramped a creative talent, and perhaps that a creative talent never cramped a military one. The singularity of their careers has earned them a place ...”

“... film ends. One of the many attractions of LA Confidential, a glossy, atmospheric movie based on a James Ellroy novel, is its unembarrassed pleasure in this kind of stuff. You get the world but you lose the girl. The girl is damaged goods, but she is Kim Basinger. The other figure in the triangle, played by Russell Crowe, is another policeman, an ex-thug who ...”

“... James Kelman was born in Glasgow in 1946. After spells in the US as a teenager, London as a young adult, he returned to Glasgow, where he now lives and works. Janice Galloway was born in Ayrshire in 1956. She worked in Ayrshire as a schoolteacher until recently, when she started making enough money from her writing to give up teaching and move to Glasgow ...”

“... less scorn, as Wells points out, is visited on descendants of those who bought their rank from James I, or of war profiteers who wrote fat cheques to Lloyd George. Keeping faith with the hereditary principle has not always been easy. We are treated to a whole chapter about a peer who owed his seat in the Lords to being the product of a virgin birth, which ...”

“... one, a brace of doctors at Malvern decided to turn that spa into the English Gräfenberg. Both Dr James Wilson and Dr James Manby Gully made quick fortunes, though Gully was eventually disgraced by his involvement in the Charles Bravo murder mystery. Hembry records that those who undertook the cold-water cure at Malvern ...”

“... Already any number of hands, licensed and otherwise, have helped to further the adventures of James Bond, Sherlock Holmes, Jeeves, Billy Bunter and Charles Pooter; not forgetting, from an earlier age, Flashman and Rochester’s mad wife. In a class of their own come the surrogate writers who are authorised to enrich the leftovers of a dead ...”

“... read about game theory and evolution, about genetics and fluid dynamics. I read about Jesse James, Bonnie and Clyde, Joseph McCarthy. I read the service manual for my parents’ ’63 Saab …’ And so on. And yet, a few years ago, Everett suddenly found himself writing ‘black’ novels – or, at least, novels about black novels. Erasure (2001) was ...”

“... which she delivers the first blow) do they come to an agreement about how to live together.Marion Turner’s ‘biography’ of the Wife of Bath sets out to explain Alysoun’s ‘long career as a bookrunner – a figure that escapes her own text’. Turner argues that much of Alysoun’s appeal comes from her ...”

“... pictures of his family escape Stallabrass’s everlasting fire. Concurrently with last year’s Turner Prize show at the Tate, Ana Maria Pacheco, a Brazilian artist long resident in this country, showed the works resulting from her year’s residency at the National Gallery. Dark Night of the Soul is a monumental piece, consisting of 19 massive figures ...”

“... Wellcome felt free to start collecting on a grander scale. In his 1994 biography, Robert Rhodes James dismissed Wellcome as a ‘magpie collector’ who tried to rationalise the contents of his hoard after the fact, and concentrated instead on his subject’s social and business interests and his patronage of scientific research. Frances Larson, in ...”

“... king’. Both kings and cockneys, he felt, were very objectionable neighbours in a hotel. Henry James thought the new breed of tourists were ‘rarely, to judge by their faces and talk, children of light to any eminent degree’. Another huge embarrassment was the female mountaineer, sometimes wearing breeches, a sight to attract a hail of stones. Up to now ...”