Search Results

“... Armstrong Nose (1996) – both edited by Alec Finlay – and Collected Poems and Songs, edited by Raymond Ross. All three books reveal Henderson, by then in his seventies and eighties, as he chose to be revealed. His only other publications had been fifty years earlier: Ballads of World War Two, collected and sometimes also written by himself, in ...”

“... slowly, deadpan, between puffs on a large cigar. A month later, at the age of 52, Julian Maclaren-Ross died of a heart attack in Ladbroke Grove. His last words, apparently, were ‘Graham Greene’ and then: ‘I love you.’ Obituaries expressed regret that Maclaren-Ross never wrote the great novel that had been expected ...”

“... review of Benn’s 1963-67 diaries and Hilary Wainwright’s Labour: A Tale of Two Parties) and ‘Raymond Williams and E.P. Thompson’. The first began, I imagine, simply as a critique of the Bennite Left and ended (famously) as a critique of Neil Kinnock. It argued that the political judgments and electoral sociology upon which the Bennites had based their ...”

“... Raymond Carver is a typically American hero, a kind of literary Rocky – janitor, delivery man, sawmill operator, servicestation attendant, an uneducated alcoholic no-hoper who rises to Major Writer status and the Professorship of English at Syracuse University. Most writers would give a right arm for such authentic redneck credentials and one can be sure that most funky jobs listed on blurbs were only held for a couple of weeks during summer vacations ...”

“... goes to show that broadcasting vices existed long before the days of Russell Brand and Jonathan Ross. None of the English writers on the British Library CD has a regional accent: Joe Orton doesn’t sound like a boy from Leicester, but like someone from Rada, which claimed only a few years of his life but all of his voice. Thankfully, some of the writers do ...”

“... he did – although the evidence suggests that he thought his thrillers journeyman stuff. It was Raymond Chandler, in that famous piece of defensive expansionism, ‘The Simple Art of Murder’, who invoked ‘tragedy’ and ‘redemption’, proclaiming that ‘down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor ...”

“... which have attempted to impose spurious quasi-markets on the NHS and the state schools. Similarly, Raymond Plant and Nicholas Deakin (in different essays) see social policy moving away from general obligations on the state, to individual entitlements, and to the construction of individual ‘packages’ which maximise the choice available to recipients of ...”

“... jilted lovers, relatives, hangers-on and rival acts. It has been left to two dedicated gig-goers, Ross Raymond and Johnny McLaughlin, to document for posterity the scene surrounding a band that ‘sounded like Airdrie … sounded like a black fucking hole’, since most of their peers ‘went off and became social workers and did courses on how to teach ...”

“... not be the criminal’s friend or protector? The same question arises in the American novels of Ross Thomas – I’m thinking especially of the wonderful Briarpatch (1984), which is set in the West, in a place that resembles Oklahoma, but not in the easy-to-watch old days. And then there is Japan lurking behind the whole tone and style of A Fistful of ...”

“... dodges. In Los Angeles he interviews an elderly private eye who may or may not be the original of Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe, and who recounts an ostensibly real-life gangster episode which brought Chandler and the archetypal Marlowe together. Similarly the investigation of the Ellery Queen biographical tangle leads into a little ‘sealed ...”

“... with her, Hyacinth is in pursuit of the fashionable Cyril, Cyril has a hopeless tendresse for Mrs Raymond, who is neither young nor beautiful, but seems merely ‘very unaffected, and rather ill’. For counterpoint, there is Edith Ottley, who is beginning to be tired of her own patience with her husband, but who is not yet the victim of human ...”

“... individuals emerge as the quiet heroes of the story. It was fortunate that A.D. Lindsay and W.D. Ross, both eminent philosophers and, respectively, master of Balliol and provost of Oriel, were exceptionally sympathetic to the plight of academic refugees, since they possessed the institutional clout to get things done. Similarly, J.L. Brierly, Chichele ...”

“... broadcasting, perhaps introducing him to the long-serving Third Programme producer, Donald Carne-Ross, and although such casual reminiscences are prone to elide important details, it only took a little more digging to reveal mentions in the Listener of several broadcasts by Frank from 1955 onwards.That he had done such talks was not in itself news to me, but ...”

“... worth). ‘It is far from honouring him who made us,’ Montaigne writes in the ‘Apology for Raymond Sébond’, ‘to honour him whom we have made.’For Braudy, Augustine is the key figure. Augustine saw Lucretia’s suicide not as proof of her virtue but the opposite. He called her ‘praeclarissa’, ‘the most visible’, her error being to have ...”

“... flashbacks over forty years, strange doings between psychiatrists and patients. It is as if Ross Macdonald or Raymond Chandler had gone Gothic, while the principal movement of the fiction remained the same: California tilted into American allegory, skeletons in every designer closet, the glossy present built over a ...”