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“... had been at least part of the inspiration for a book by one of the editors of this volume, John Elliott: his Richelieu and Olivares (1984). For all that this volume is produced with the lavishness we have come to expect from Yale University Press, with no less than 74 illustrations, most of them portraits of 37 ‘favourites’ and of the monarchs they ...”

“... bad writing calling students to their doom. ‘I didn’t disillusion my poor charges,’ the old guy sobbed. Why do I remember this? He was too much like me, and I saw my father in the mirror, growing sad, he had a tale to tell me urgently, but I couldn’t hear, or stay to listen. I moved out of bohemia, Kerouac went mad there, that’s a lesson, then he ...”

“... is a particularly vivid example of Rendell’s skill in exploring obsessive psychopathologies. Guy Curran, from whose point of view the story is told, is a 29-year old drug dealer, who has been fixatedly in love with an upper-middle-class girl called Leonora Chisholm for over ten years, since they spent time together on the streets of Notting Hill as ...”

“... with the line ‘A pleasant smell of frying sausages’ or (in inverted commas) ‘Once I let a guy blow me. I kind of backed away from the experience,’ we know that an anecdote or drama, with Auden’s or Larkin’s narrative punch, will not follow. And yet the absence of a drama in some of the poems of Shadow Train is also its presence. A good example ...”

“... hearing it spoken with his un-English, un-American accent, and reinvented as an estrangement. John Updike is a self-confessed fan, but Joyce Carol Oates, who is not, has also conducted a wonderfully ingenious argument with Nabokov in several novels including The Childwold in 1976 and her Chappaquiddick novella, Black Water, in 1992, where the question of ...”

“... than it could bear.’ We know from Hutton, however, that the JIC wasn’t simply the fall guy in this deception, since its members had played their part in meeting the not so subconscious desires of their political masters and dressing the intelligence up. So should John Scarlett, the head of the JIC, take the ...”

“... Bill, where he studied English and edited the Daily Bruin (Watergate conspirators Bob Haldeman and John Ehrlichman were his arch-enemies on the paper). By then, he’d already been part of the Allied occupation of Germany pulling bodies out of the rubble, gone AWOL to attend the Nuremberg Trials (with the intention of assassinating Hermann Göring) and worked ...”

“... like a person. Allen Curnow, like the later Auden, has the gift of making a contraption with a guy inside it, someone whose interest is not that of being a poet. Nor of coming from New Zealand. He has his own country, caught in a transparent gleam by such poems as ‘A Passion for Travel’. It’s quite often a question of a letter or two. The ...”

“... movements and events: the Catharists, the Brethren of the Free Spirit, the Lollards, the Ranters, John of Leyden and the French Commune. Marcus draws these and others into his secret history of the 20th century because he is interested in revolution and apocalypse: the kind of secret history which moves not in a world elsewhere, beyond the periphery of our ...”

“... except style: sly, fake-lazy, apparently frivolous in the case of Washington, a clever black guy playing other people’s idea of a not so bright black guy; and brisk, smooth and bitchy in the case of Foster, everyone’s idea of what power would look like if women had it. There is some kind of metaphor in the making ...”

“... a woman and two men sitting at a bar, while the unseen speakers make guesses: ‘I think the white guy and the Asian girl are a couple and the Asian guy is her brother’; ‘Or the Asian girl and the Asian guy are a couple, and the white guy is their ...”

“... Ian Rankin’s novel Knots & Crosses introduced us to a tough Edinburgh Detective Sergeant called John Rebus. A series of local girls had been kidnapped and strangled. Rebus – 41-year-old drinker, ex-soldier, failed husband, absentee father, Christian, annual rereader of Crime and Punishment – begins receiving a series of cryptic notes. The first few ...”

“... The missions include tasks such as breaking up union meetings, murdering a pizza delivery guy by running him over, buying clothes appropriate for Miami Vice-era Florida, and arranging drug buys. The soundtrack to this is provided by the radio stations available in the player’s car, which play the relevant music with an often hilarious commentary. A ...”

“... The chief pleasure of the new version of The Taking of Pelham One Two Three is the sight of John Travolta as the model bad guy. He is genial and livid by turns, entirely persuasive in both moods, the very image of crazed behaviour, and far more engaging and unhinged than he was in Pulp Fiction ...”

“... On 2 February 1940, Guy Liddell, MI5’s director of counter-espionage, wrote in his diary: An elderly statesman with gout When asked what the war was about In a written reply Said ‘My colleagues and I Are doing our best to find out’ A not inapposite comment on the Phoney War (and we learn from Liddell that there was a good deal of hidden last-minute talk between Chamberlain and Goering), the verse also conveys something of the self-contained world of MI5 ...”