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“... of architecture is replete with figures whose careers were tied to the fortunes of great cities. John Nash’s genius for town-planning could only have flourished in London during the post-Waterloo boom years. Stanford White’s feeling for opulence fits the New York scene of the 1890s like an evening glove. So, too, did mid-Victorian Glasgow define the ...”

“... In order to write this book, I had to do a great deal of research,’ Rupert Thomson tells us; the research for Air and Fire evidently took two forms. The narrative centres on the quixotic attempt by a disciple of Gustave Eiffel to build a modernist cathedral, based on the Tower’s logical steel geometry. This would be unsurprising in 1890-something, except that this architect chooses to build his cathedral in a god-forsaken small town in Baja California, the peninsula that dangles along the West Coast with the Gulf of Mexico on one side and the Pacific wastes on the other ...”

“... appetite, though, was not a late development. In Simon Callow’s biography the composer Virgil Thomson reports the 22-year-old actor-director devouring ‘oysters and champagne, red meat and burgundy, dessert and brandy’ immediately before squeezing into a canvas corset to play Brutus in Julius Caesar. Later in the run, Welles found time during the ...”

“... Eagar says he always hoped his pictures would be the illustrations to go with what he read in John Woodcock’s reports for the Times and what he heard in the radio commentary of John Arlott. On Midsummer’s Day in 1975, Clive Lloyd captained the West Indies team to victory at Lord’s in the first one-day world cup ...”

“... A makeshift bed was set up on the terrace overlooking San Giovanni, with its statues of Christ and John the Baptist. A frozen winter light hung over the church and wisps of mist blew off the statues. I lay on the bed wrapped in my raincoat and tried to sleep. The rooftop had a high wire-mesh fence round it to prevent patients from jumping off. (In November ...”

“... I have taken the view that my ‘Desert Island’ book, if I were asked, would have to be David Thomson’s A Biographical Dictionary of the Cinema. First published in 1970, it has just re-appeared as A Biographical Dictionary of Film in a third edition that is revised and considerably enlarged. Despite its titles it is indeed a work of criticism: ‘each ...”

“... the two most striking works of the English critic who writes best about the American cinema. David Thomson’s magnificent Biographical Dictionary of the Cinema (1975 – revised edition, 1980) and his lurid Overexposures: The Crisis in American Film-Making (1981) are the work of an intellectual who loves and distrusts films. Throughout Overexposures, he ...”

“... is this, written by the man who made it?It would be hard to deliver a brief biographical sketch of John Boorman that was tidy or plausible. Yet it would be harder still to leave a reader in any doubt about his integrity, his passion and his blithe disdain for success, more radiant than gloomy. At 87, it’s his life, and he has resolved to treat it as a ...”

“... that Bush’s delivery is really an impersonation of Ronald Reagan impersonating James Stewart and John Wayne, but I think that elevates him too much: his mentality is clouded with lesser subtleties, occluded with hungers of a more brutal, mercenary, low-budget kind. He has the effective salesman’s knowledge of how to play with people’s sense of what is ...”

“... dismemberings. Methuen (which celebrates its centenary in 1989) was sold in 1987 to International Thomson, who broke it up, selling the general and children’s list to Paul Hamlyn’s Octopus, itself subsequently acquired by Reed International. Methuen’s academic books remained with Thomson, who now bring them out under ...”

“... Rupert Thomson’s​ new novel follows the contours of a remarkable life. Lucy Schwob, born in 1894 to a cultured and prosperous Nantes family, moved to Paris in 1920, where she developed strong links with the Surrealist movement and adopted the name Claude Cahun. Though she produced work in a number of media, and in her lifetime was known as a writer, she is now remembered for her photographic self-portraits, mainly taken in the 1920s, which stage her in various personae (aviator, buddha, doll, angel ...”

“... years of Africa as I had months – almost After Casement’s arrest in 1916, Conrad wrote to John Quinn in New York: We never talked politics ... He was a good companion: but already in Africa I judged that he was a man, properly speaking, of no mind at all. I don’t mean stupid. I mean that he was all emotion. By emotional force (Congo ...”

“... Benjamín Labatut (Pushkin, £20), which is an astonishing scenario of the Hungarian mathematician John von Neumann. He was a helpless genius, who laid down principles that were vital in the development of computers, game theory and our understanding of evolution (he was a father to fathers), and in the decision at Los Alamos to use implosion for the Bomb. I ...”

“... There would be one more escape, in 1960. Frank Morris and the Anglin brothers, Clarence and John, got away – and not one body washed up anywhere. That’s the basis for the Don Siegel film, Escape from Alcatraz (1979), in which Clint Eastwood played Morris and the warden was the late Patrick McGoohan, so famous himself as ‘The Prisoner’. There was ...”

“... newspapers.* Last summer? Well, that problem was solved last week when the Gospel according to St John, all 1300 pages of it, beat the dust out of the doormat. It is a sure sign that spring is in the air when Wisden arrives. While there is a good twelve months browse therein, one flick through is enough to stir the brain cells. It is the cricketer’s holy ...”