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“... The mutable nature of our relationship with the past is the underlying theme of Sentimental Murder, John Brewer’s compelling and surprising pursuit, across two and a half centuries, of the events of a single evening in 1779. What happened in Covent Garden on 7 April was simple enough and largely undisputed at the time or later ...”

“... led to several investigations into an alleged shoot to kill policy, the most notable headed by John Stalker, then deputy chief constable of Manchester. Stalker’s inquiry was continually obstructed by elements within the RUC and he was eventually, and very controversially, dismissed from the police. The findings of ...”

“... the USPS, Lennon picks up the low hum of the invisible republic. Like the eavesdropping couple in John Cheever’s ‘The Enormous Radio’, Mailman is a psychic receiver for the secrets of those around him. His precious archive of photocopied mail, built up over many years of invading his customers’ privacy, is the main reason for his emotional attachment ...”

“... the capitalist drive at rest. That’s where the interest of Andrei Tarkovsky’s masterpiece Stalker lies, with its post-industrial wasteland in which wild vegetation takes over abandoned factories, concrete tunnels and railroads full of stale water, and stray cats and dogs wander the overgrowth. Nature and industrial civilisation overlap, but in a ...”

“... Julie’s domestic existence is shattered; in Enduring Love, Clarissa and Joe witness the death of John Logan as he falls from a balloon, are changed for ever, and spend the rest of the novel trying to absorb the consequences of the spectacle; Black Dogs is in part about how Bernard Tremaine, a politician, scientist and rationalist, drifts away from his ...”

“... also against the poet’s own incommensurability to the occasion. These are the valentines of a stalker who hates everything too much to let it go without a fight. ‘I want to date-rape life,’ he writes in an earlier poem, ‘I want to drive into a drive-in bank and kiss/And kill you, life.’ In the poems that follow, in Ooga-Booga and now in ‘Evening ...”

“... of its good and bad angels, the authoritative and the authoritarian. Linguistic conservatives like John Simon, who sometimes seem not only not to mind being disliked but to thrive on it, do not shrink from such acts of authority as will promptly be branded authoritarian – a word wielded in Sidney Greenbaum’s tour de task-force The English Language ...”

“... novel sequence from the era of Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper). Nobody else would link John Betjeman with Anthony Frewin, compiler of The Assassination of John F. Kennedy: An Annotated Film, TV and Videography 1963-92. At this point, Seabrook needs a videography, not a bibliography. He is what he watches, late at ...”

“... with his new wife, Anna, and their baby, hence the perverse pull of the place (Rachel is a stalker). But she can remember nothing. She spends a lot of time considering whether hypnotherapy might restore memories lost to blackout, researching whether they can be so deeply buried in the mind that it is as if they have never existed: ‘Total black; hours ...”

“... on the telephone, that he will very soon have to ‘disappear’. The discovery of authors such as John Cowper Powys, about whom Vaes knows nothing, is paralleled in his reinvention of London districts such as Kensal Rise, Shadwell and Fulham. Remaining in Belgium, he finds another London with which he is comfortable: a ‘malleable’ capital with more appeal ...”

“... Child in Time (1987) and Amsterdam (1998), the voyeuristic ex-husband in The Innocent (1990), the stalker in Enduring Love (1997): in most of his books there’s at least one character who’s mesmerised by powerful fantasies, sometimes to the exclusion of everything else. And since ‘stories demand simple and incisive sets of oppositions,’ as McEwan told ...”

“... first two epigraphs to the book are plain sentences from the American novelists Thomas McGuane and John O’Hara about how we judge ourselves and others. The third epigraph is a sentence from Hamlet: ‘From the table of my memory/I’ll wipe away all trivial fond records/All saws of books, all forms, all pressures past/That youth and observation copied ...”

“... writing. It certainly didn’t come from an exotic or overtly troubled upbringing. Born Angela Stalker in 1940 in Eastbourne, she was the daughter of a journalist father who was perhaps the original of Melanie’s, a man ‘compounded’ of ‘tweed and tobacco and type-writer ribbon’, and a mother who had been a cashier in Selfridges. As a child she was ...”

“... in a health club and dated a painter and decorator she calls ‘Mr C’, later immortalised as the stalker in the Blondie song ‘One Way or Another’.But she couldn’t keep away from ‘the downtown scene’ for long, and started driving in at weekends to see the New York Dolls. ‘They were so exciting to watch … Strutting, swaggering about in their ...”

“... him with Basil Fawlty. Except that the dying Dennis Potter went further, maybe, when he called John Birt, the BBC’s then director-general, ‘a croak-voiced Dalek’ in 1993. Much expectation surrounded Doctor Who’s return last year, into an industry that has changed vastly since he went away. Mark Thompson, the BBC’s current director-general, sees ...”